“It’s What’s Inside” is an entertaining and disturbing debut

As the spooky season approaches, multiplexes and home streaming platforms are full of genre-appropriate ways to celebrate it. But consider skipping the line of trauma metaphor creature features and bloody slashers to explore something unsettling on a different level. Newcomer Greg Jardin’s debut feature, “It’s What’s Inside,” mines a well-worn horror set-up for a thrilling and inventive mystery that’s as crowd-pleasing as it is disorienting. 

When it wowed at Sundance back in January, most early reactions name-checked many of the same films for points of comparison: 1985’s “Clue” for its ridiculous whodunit structure, 2013’s “Coherence” for its science fiction bent, and 2023’s “Bodies Bodies Bodies” for its engagement with social media’s role in modern interactions. Even with those obvious touchstones, the resulting film is truly its own beast.

Set the night before a wedding, eight friends from college reunite for a private party they each promised to attend back in their youth. The son of a deceased artist, Reuben (Devon Terrell), is getting married, so all the erstwhile pals who helped him through that loss when they were young reconvene to celebrate the next phase of his life. The long-suffering couple Shelby (Brittany O’Grady) and her boyfriend Cyrus (James Morosini) become our entry point into this friend group. We meet them and their interpersonal issues before anyone else as Shelby, in a wig and make-up designed to make her look like their famous influencer friend Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey), attempts to surprise and seduce Cyrus, who she catches masturbating thinking she left the house for a run. 

Once they arrive at Reuben’s inherited estate and the rest of the gang make awkward jokes about how Shelby and Cyrus have been together eight years but aren’t married, it becomes clear that they’re not the only ones who brought baggage to the party. Nikki is there and seems to bristle at light ribbing about her popularity. Trust fund bad boy Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood) is trying too hard to be up to “big things.” Reuben seems to have unfinished business with his ex, granola girl Maya (Nina Bloomgarden), and artist Brooke (Reina Hardesty). Each of these teased subplots seems as though they’ll develop as the secluded location, alcohol, and drugs all work together to foster more drama until tech nerd Forbes (David W. Thompson) shows up with a suitcase and a game to play.

No one has seen or spoken to Forbes since a birthday party led to his sister Beatrice (Madison Davenport) having a psychotic episode and himself being expelled from school. But since his absence, he’s worked for a company that has devised a mysterious machine. In all its analog beauty, he unveils a switchboard that looks like Polaroid designed a lie detector test. Without explaining beforehand how his game works, he convinces the group to affix sensors to their temples before his arcane gizmo unceremoniously swaps everyone’s consciousness into one another’s bodies.

At first, it is horrifying and shock-inducing, but the afterglow from the temporary taste of life in someone else’s shoes is higher than the joints they were passing around previously. Forbes proposes they play a game where they’ll all switch bodies every round and then try to guess who is who. But Cyrus, who seems the most gung-ho for this new experience in round one, is suspiciously hesitant to play another round when he sees how much Shelby, initially opposed to the game, is enjoying herself. Just as the sad metaphor for swinging and polyamory settles in with the viewer, the sexual side of the body switching takes a turn for the worse, and the film bores full stop into a more dangerous and deadly game.

Jardin’s script and the gifted, spry ensemble make what could be a confusing mess easy to parse. Though complex, the ever-shifting dynamics and the “who is really who” game become easier to follow with deliberate staging, dynamic camera work, and some color-coded lighting telegraphed in a piece of art Brooke shows her friends earlier in the night. Some swapped identities are made plain to the viewer to provide an anchor point. The performances and interactions allow the audience to fill in the rest for themselves based on the availableinformation. It’s a pleasant pace change compared to something like “Knives Out” or its sequel “Glass Onion,” both of which deconstruct the whodunit genre. For much of its runtime, “It’s What’s Inside” is an enjoyable experience.

But for all its comedic tenor (none of the jokes are laugh-out-loud funny so much as darkly humorous), there are these quiet and plaintive moments where the characters wrestle with their identities and how they are seen. At one point, Shelby is inside Nikki’s body, a mirror to her introduction, where she tries to pretend to be her to get her boyfriend to show her affection. She posts a throwaway selfie from the bathroom and instantly sees thousands of likes and comments, contrasting with a moment earlier when she does the same from her own body and gets so little engagement that she deletes it in shame. The commentary on how the internet is a panopticon of our own making may seem surface-level. However, the way O’Grady and Debnam-Cary capture Shelby’s internal turmoil, whether in her body or Nikki’s, hit someplace deep.

A better version of this film would be more ambitious thematically. For all the narrative options its premise provides, Jardin makes no effort to unpack the implications of cross-gender body swapping, perhaps unwilling to overstep as a cis-man. Similarly, anything racial or cultural is glossed over entirely or utilized for a couple of cheap jokes that feel tacked on more than anything else. 

But rather than some moral cowardice, it feels like the characters are all more simply drawn out of necessity. Eight whole figures can only each have so much nuance or intricacy before the fun of differentiating their collective out-of-body experiences becomes like the cinematic equivalent of solving difficult math problems.

‘It’s What’s Inside’ is a compelling and entertaining film that manages to overshadow its minor flaws. It’s a fun journey that leaves you pondering your own identity and the nature of identity itself. It may not be as terrifying as being chased by a knife-wielding clown, but it’s a thought-provoking experience that lingers with you long after the credits roll.

“It’s What’s Inside” is streaming exclusively on Netflix.