Warning: This post contains spoilers for It’s What’s Inside.
The concept of body-swapping in horror movies is nothing new. Just think about Christopher Landon’s Freaky, Joe Lynch’s Suitable Flesh, and, of course, Jordan Peele’s inimitable Get Out.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]However, in those films, the swapping happens against one or both of the swappers’ wills. In writer-director Greg Jardin’s debut feature It’s What’s Inside, on the other hand, a group of college friends reunited for the night before the wedding of one of their own all make the conscious decision to mentally trade places amongst themselves—to disastrous results.
Following a buzzy premiere at Sundance, the low-budget, high-concept horror comedy is now streaming on Netflix (which purchased the genre-bender earlier this year for a cool $17 million, one of the biggest sales in the festival’s history). “Initially I was pitching it as The Big Chill meets Freaky Friday by way of Black Mirror,” Jardin told IndieWire of the inspiration behind his surprise breakout hit. “When I initially came up with the idea, I saw it as a straight-up sci-fi comedy. And then as I was really working through it…I thought, maybe I can lean into a darker vibe but still be funny.”
The movie opens with anxious lead Shelby (Brittany O’Grady) trying and failing to seduce her longtime—and clearly indifferent—boyfriend Cyrus (James Morosini) into a role-playing scenario involving a blonde wig. It’s a thinly-veiled display of Shelby’s insecurities surrounding Cyrus’ interest in women who don’t look anything like her, particularly their old college friend-turned-social media influencer Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey).
The struggling couple then heads to a pre-wedding party at the eclectic mansion of the late mother of the groom-to-be, their friend Reuben (Devon Terrell). There, they reunite with the rest of their college cohort, artsy party girl Brooke (Reina Hardesty), trust-fund baby Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood), spiritual seeker Maya (Nina Bloomgarden), and Nikki.
Suddenly, there’s a knock on the door and their estranged friend Forbes (David Thompson), who was expelled from college following an incident at a party involving his unstable younger sister, Beatrice (Madison Davenport), shows up. Forbes, who has spent the past eight years working in tech, offers the group a chance to test out his team’s latest invention, a “game” contained within a suitcase that allows everyone in the group to temporarily and randomly swap bodies.
The first time, nobody knows what they’re getting into. But the gang, despite Shelby’s initial reluctance, subsequently all make the choice to participate in a second and third round. Naturally, horrifying chaos quickly ensues.
While Jardin does a good job of making it pretty clear who’s in whose body throughout the movie, the existential thrills kick into high gear after Reuben and Brooke, who are inside the bodies of Dennis and Maya, fall from a crumbling balcony while in the throes of passion and are killed instantly. This leaves the rest of the group to decide how to handle the switch back now that two of their bodies are broken and unusable.
Unable to agree on what they should do, the survivors split into factions and plot various ways to double-cross each other to get what they want. However, it turns out they were all being scammed from the start, as Beatrice was the one inside Forbes’ body all along. We learn that Beatrice stole Forbes’ body and his machine in order to get revenge for that long-ago party, which ended in Forbes and Dennis getting in a physical altercation over Dennis hooking up with a then-high-school-aged Beatrice while he was dating Nikki and ultimately landed Beatrice in a mental hospital.
By the end of the movie, only Shelby and Cyrus are back inside their own bodies, with Cyrus left to take the fall for Reuben and Brooke’s deaths (while in the bodies of Dennis and Maya) as Dennis called the cops while still inside Cyrus’ body and claimed to have pushed them. Meanwhile, Maya is trapped in Brooke’s body, Nikki in Reuben’s, Dennis in Forbes’, and Beatrice—who transferred all of Dennis’ trust-fund money into her own offshore account—in Nikki’s.
We see Beatrice (as Nikki) driving off into the sunset with the suitcase in tow before we get a flashback to her (then in Forbes’ body) explaining the addictive nature of the machine. “Every new body you go into gives you a new piece of the human condition,” she says. “And then, after a while, you just want to constantly switch.”
