It’s What’s Inside made waves earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, where its $17 million acquisition by Netflix made it the splashiest pick-up there. It’s easy to see why the film drew such a big price tag: It’s innovative and wonderfully performed. Written and directed by Greg Jardin, it’s a high-concept thriller that fuses body-swapping with social media anxiety. And it’s got one of the wildest sex scenes of the year.
The film starts out in familiar territory, with an upcoming wedding (complete with its own hashtag, naturally) reuniting a group of friends at a pre-wedding party. There’s Shelby (Brittany O’Grady) and her long-term boyfriend Cyrus (James Morosini), successful influencer Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey), trust-fund punk Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood), free spirit Maya (Nina Bloomgarden), bubbly artist Brooke (Reina Hardesty) and soon-to-be-married Reuben (Devon Terrell), who is hosting the event. All of their relationship dynamics are tested—unrequited love, jealousy, and even some people genuinely happy to see their friends.
Things take a turn when Forbes (David Thompson), who the group hasn’t seen since college, appears. He was part of their friend group then, but an incident involving his sister meant that nobody had seen him in nearly a decade. Forbes brought with him a game that nobody’s prepared for. He wields a briefcase that has some new, barely-tested technology inside it: the ability to swap bodies with someone else. That leads to a wickedly entertaining game of body-swapping, in which everyone at the party has to guess who has taken whose body over.
After a quick first round where everyone’s true identities are quickly established, things start to unravel in round two as everyone gets better at playing the game. This round lasts much longer, giving people the opportunity to wander around the massive estate. This leads to two pairs spending some, shall we say, indecent, time together: Forbes and Nikki, and Maya and Dennis. Except on the inside, the four of them are entirely different people; Forbes is Cyrus; Nikki is Shelby; Maya is Brooke; and Dennis is Reuben.
There’s a sense of recklessness that takes over, particularly for Brooke and Reuben. It’s What’s Inside is fueled by social anxiety: the way we present ourselves online, how we can’t help but compare ourselves to people we deem more or less successful than us, and why our lives can feel unsatisfying when others seem to be having so much damn fun.
For these characters, this game has given them the opportunity to literally become an entirely different person, freeing them of those anxieties and making it easy to understand why everyone is willing to play a game in which the consequences are unknowable. If you had the chance to completely rid yourself of the miseries within yourself, even if for a brief moment, wouldn’t you take it?
Shelby certainly would. We see her struggles at the beginning of the film, obsessively poring over Nikki’s Instagram and rapidly deleting her own posts if they didn’t get enough likes. She also knows her boyfriend Cyrus has been harboring feelings for Nikki for years, and they’ve never gone away. Frustrated by the lack of sex in her and Cyrus’ relationship, Shelby seizes the opportunity to inhabit Nikki’s body to make love to her boyfriend—who, again, is also in a different body. Forbes has body-swapped with Cyrus.
But as the two start to have sex, Shelby makes Cyrus (as Forbes) call her Nikki, both because she knows he loves Nikki, and because she wants to be Nikki. It simultaneously fulfills her desire to be someone else and her desire to get laid all at once. It’s uncomfortable, mesmerizing, and utterly bizarre—yet those impulses feel grounded and natural. That’s not the case for Cyrus, who’s weirded out by the whole thing. Even though he’s kissing the girl he’s always wanted (Nikki), he knows it’s his girlfriend, Shelby, so he stops things before they get too intense.
Brooke (as Maya) and Reuben (as Dennis) however, have no intentions of holding back. They find themselves on a top-floor balcony, and it’s not long before they’re all over each other. Old feelings bubble up as they look into each other’s eyes, and even though they never reveal to each other who they actually are, they inherently know. Or do they? They never use each other’s names. Brooke and Reuben may think they’re with someone else, perhaps another person they’ve had long-dormant feelings for, and their pure desire takes over, ruling out logic entirely.
Reuben and Brooke cannot keep their hands off each other. They have sex leaning back onto the balcony railing. Brooke says, “I’ve always wanted you,” and Reuben says, “I want to marry you”—a statement laced with irony as this whole party is celebrating his marriage to someone else. But as the throes of passion overtake them, and the thrill of being in another body overwhelms them, the balcony wall shatters, and the pair fall to their grisly death.
This brutal moment sends It’s What’s Inside into overdrive, as its acute examination of what it feels like to be someone else—and have sex while doing it. With so many thrillers coming out each year, it’s amazing to have a sex scene as bold and fresh as this one.
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