In It’s What’s Inside, a group of old college friends reunite to party together one last time before one of them— Reuben (Devon Terrell)—gets married. They had planned for a night of drunken revelry and nostalgic reminiscence, only for things to take a very different turn when Forbes (David W Thompson)—the oddball friend who none of them have heard from since their student days—turns up clutching a mysterious briefcase.

 

Writer-director Greg Jardin’s debut feature film is whirring with creative energy right from the get-go. The film opens with an argument between Cyrus (James Morosini) and Shelby (Brittany O’Grady), with the camera whipping back and forth between the long-term boyfriend and girlfriend at an increasingly rapid clip until the effect is almost nauseating. On the car ride to the get-together, the screen starts sliding apart into different segments, displaying Shelby’s social media feed as Cyrus’s voice gradually takes up less and less of her attention.

 

When the pair of them finally arrive, two other guests—Brooke (Reina Hardesty) and Maya (Nina Bloomgarden)—fill them in on the events that led to Forbes’s expulsion from the group, depicted for the audience as a flipbook-style series of Facebook photos from that night, with the details changing as Brooke and Maya correct each other’s memories. It’s a lot of fun, but it quickly becomes clear that It’s What’s Inside isn’t just here to dazzle us with visual trickery.

From the split-screens to the flashbacks to Cyrus and Shelby’s obsession with their influencer friend Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey), everything in the film points toward a central idea about how we see ourselves and each other. And that idea becomes even more important to them all when Forbes opens up his briefcase to reveal a machine that allows them all to swap bodies.

 

It’s a clever sci-fi conceit that It’s What’s Inside builds an even cleverer story around as the group decides to play a Mafia-like game where they all swap bodies at random (or, at least, Forbes assures them that it’s at random) and try to guess who each person really is. Most interestingly, we get to see actors first playing their own character and their character playing another character as they try to avoid detection. It’s head-spinning stuff in the most enjoyable way as you try to keep track of which characters you’re really watching at any given moment.

The chance to step into each other’s bodies also gives each character an opportunity to do things they’d never have been comfortable doing in their own skin. The film wisely ratchets up the messiness of it all by establishing that this is a social group filled with unrequited crushes, secret affairs, and long-held resentments, all of which rise to the surface as the night wears on.

 

At one point, the characters sit in a circle while preparing for the next round of the game to begin. The camera turns from one face to the next, moving faster and faster until the whole room is spun into a colourful blur. And that’s the sensation that best sums up It’s What’s Inside, as the camera, the cuts, the needle drops, and the story twists all contribute to the feeling of a machine that’s spinning faster and faster until, finally, it careens right out of control.

To a certain degree, it can feel like our sense of who each character is and what swapping into a particular body might mean to them gets a little lost in the shuffle. The film floats ideas about Shelby envying Nikki’s allure and how the more nebbish guys like Cyrus might envy Reuben’s extroverted charms, but it’s all a little thin. This becomes slightly more of a problem when some of the third act’s drama relies upon one of these dynamics.

 

For its big finale, the film tries to pull off a Midsommar-esque blast of catharsis. When we watch a guy get burned alive in Ari Aster’s film, we’re aware that this can’t rationally be called a just punishment for his crimes, but it’s satisfying all the same because the man in question has been an unrelenting, gaslighting asshole, and the sort that usually goes unavenged on screen. It’s What’s Inside gets the formula a little bit off and the blackly comic note it ends on is rendered much less satisfying as a result. But just as a good party game isn’t ruined by a lacklustre final round, Jardin’s film is far too pleasurable to hold its mildly disappointing conclusion against it.

 

8/10

Boluwatife Adesina
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Boluwatife Adesina is a media writer and the helmer of the Downtown Review page. He’s probably in a cinema near you.