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.
