This review is spoiler-lite, containing non-essential details that let you know what to expect.
A few weeks ago, I started seeing promotion for Netflix’s new movie It’s What’s Inside. Perhaps years of development in this area have left me especially attuned so that just by seeing a poster I know I’m looking at a bodyswap work.
Eight twentysomething friends are reuniting for a little gathering before one of their weddings. Somehow, they were all friends in college despite having extremely diverse personalities that would never seem to have common ground: the wannabe player, the new agey girl, the influencer, the nerd, etc. You could buy three or four of these people hanging out, but all eight of them is a bit of a stretch, but you wouldn’t have as much of a movie with half the cast.
The premise is one that will be familiar to anyone who’s read a bunch of Fictionmania stories or Kindle Unlimited freebies: one of the friends, a programmer known for hosting game night, shows up with a mysterious piece of technology that can be used to swap bodies. He and his team generally use it to play a Werewolf-like guessing game, and hey, wouldn’t that be fun? Everyone gets over their reservations pretty quickly and signs onto the game where you get to pretend to be your friends. It’s always a little flimsy when you put it like that but the movie does a decent job depicting it as something that would make for a fun night.
I won’t explain who-becomes-who, especially since there are multiple rounds of the game, but I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by giving away that there are no major TG elements to this piece: there’s four guys and four girls and for the bulk of the film, the guys become guys and the girls become girls. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — if you put a TG element into a movie it quickly threatens to take over, but it could have been fun to include offhandedly in a film like this that is otherwise willing to be daring with its subject matter. But if so, it would have been a very different film because the boy-girl alignments are pretty important to the story and slotting in some gender-swapping action before the climax would have simply been gratuitous and a distraction. As it is, they pursue hidden desires, attempt to correct recent bad behavior, and address long-simmering group drama. Since the characters don’t go out into the world or anything, it’s basically just an elaborate masquerade that lets them shed their inhibitions for a few minutes.
If I’m an average viewer, I’m probably pretty impressed by the audacity of the premise: body-hijacking, sexual trysts (after all, would it not be fun to use your friend’s junk for a night?), and of course everything inevitably going wrong. The movie goes about as far as mainstream society would let it go, and perhaps a degree further to really earn its psycho-thriller cred.
And anyone at all would be impressed by the stylish execution: the movie does a few editing tricks to let you know who you’re looking at, but also generally keeps the mood claustrophobic, paranoid, and weird. The story is set in a creepy old mansion that doubles as an art installation so there’s no shortage of compelling sets.
As it happens, things go sideways and some people are unable to return to their natural bodies and there’s a lot of to-do about what that all means. The movie kind of spins its wheels for its third act as we wait for cops who never seem to arrive and try to untangle the knot of who-should-be-who.
Ultimately, the movie overperforms for what it should be, but still leaves room for improvement. It doesn’t manage to say anything meaningful about the characters, the nature of their behavior or their treatment of one another, it just becomes, as we suspect from the beginning, a convoluted revenge plot to cause chaos in unsuspecting lives. The characters are uprooted, a few changed for the better but mostly for the worse, but more still could have been said. The movie is satisfied with what it has done, and while it has provided a satisfactory evening’s viewing, it also leaves a more seasoned viewer like you or me wanting more — especially in the way it hurries all of its characters offstage in its final moments without really reckoning with the new status quo, and provides a twist reveal in its closing scenes that seems clever until you start asking questions about how certain characters knew everything they did.
A worse, simpler, less-ambitious movie wouldn’t have left me quite as unfulfilled, so perhaps the final word on It’s What’s Inside is only that it’s a shame it couldn’t go further and didn’t have more time to get beyond “who did what and with which and to whom” and “who/what do you really want.” There’s a lot to be said about the human condition and wanting what other people have in a day and age where everyone is drooling over each other’s social media, and the movie just kind of scratches the surface of that. It may still be the best bodyswapping sexual thriller you see from a major distributor, though, so the movie should be pleased with that.