If there’s one thing movies have taught us it’s you should never, ever be alone in a house. Heck, even with other people. You’re just going to get haunted, or you’re going to get slashed, or at the very least your place will be an absolute mess in the morning and you’ll have to tell your parents what really happened. So go outside, dang it! You’re more likely to star in a romantic comedy if you’re not trapped in an isolated mansion on a dark and gloomy night, making side-eyes at your old college friends who secretly hate you or want you dead.
Then again, if you do stay inside, you might as well watch Greg Jardin’s engrossingly mean-spirited “It’s What’s Inside,” which takes the familiar setup — we sure are alone in this house and nothing bad could possibly happen to us — and adds a millennial sci-fi thriller twist. By the time the bodies pile up, the question isn’t “whodunnit,” the question is “who’s really in my body and what are they doing with it?”
“It’s What’s Inside” takes place at a party the night before the wedding of Reuben (Devon Terrell), when all of his mostly awful friends gather at his mother’s fabulous estate. She was a famous artist, you see, which is why the building is filled with ridiculous-looking crystal rooms and giant statues of vaginas. Surely, of course, that can’t possibly be an excuse to production design the hell out of a low budget movie that takes place almost entirely in one house so that it looks more interesting that it otherwise would. Surely.
Anyhoo, Reuben’s get-together is well-attended. There’s party boy Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood), online influencer Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey), artsy Brooke (Reina Hardesty), spiritual Maya (Nina Bloomgarden), and deeply insecure couple Shelby (Brittany O’Grady) and Cyrus (James Morosini). Shelby and Cyrus have been together for years, but he’s more interested in pornography than he is in touching her, and he’s much more interested in explaining why he’s not ready for marriage than he is in breaking up.
The festivities kick into weird, high gear when Reuben reveals he also invited Forbes (David W. Thompson), who got expelled from their college after a scandal involving Reuben, Dennis and Forbes’ underage sister. It’s cool though. He’s a tech millionaire now and he’s totally willing to let bygones be bygones. He even brought his latest invention to the party: a machine with the power to swap bodies. That’s a thing that exists now.
Obviously a machine like this has incredible implications and could potentially change the world, but these are millennials we’re talking about, so they’re going to use it for party games. Everyone switches bodies with a random person, and like a game of “Mafia” or “Werewolf,” everyone else has to figure out who’s really who. These people are, at least, genuinely amazed by their predicament for a couple minutes, but they get over the novelty quickly. Surely there are opportunities they would all be desperate to explore; someone with a peanut allergy could finally gorge themselves on Reese’s Pieces, for example. But no, party games are what we’re doing with this. And because some people are total a-holes, party games are about to be the literal death of them.
Like Halina Reijn’s brilliantly bitter “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” Jardin’s film takes a classic old dark house setup and reinvents it by centering a younger generation. And like “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” Jardin’s film is mean-spirited and judgmental. There was a time when critics complained that 1980s slasher movies were cruel to Gen X teenagers, but the “Friday the 13th” movies saw those kids as just regular ol’ kids, oblivious victims who did nothing to deserve their horrifying fates. “It’s What’s Inside” argues that no, the majority of these characters deserve total oblivion and they’re going to get it. The soundtrack even lifts Bruno Nicolai’s theme from the 1972 giallo “The Red Queen Kills Seven Times,” as if to say yes, this movie is going to get harsh. Strap yourselves in.
And while the body count isn’t exactly zero, “It’s What’s Inside” isn’t a bloodbath either. It’s not a story about murder, it’s a story about excuses and the way we can weasel ourselves into and out of trouble without accepting any responsibility for what we’ve done or why we’ve done it. The majority of Jardin’s movie follows the perspective of Cyrus, who isn’t a bad person for falling out of love with his girlfriend — he’s a bad person because he’s too cowardly to admit it, and instead tries to convince Shelby that their problems are all her fault. While we may be able to sympathize with his bizarre plight as the victim of body swapping criminality, we also want his uppance to come. We’re invited — nay, encouraged — to root against the person we know the most about. “It’s What’s Inside” understands the concept of sympathy, but with people like this, the movie advises against it.
Jardin’s clever-as-hell screenplay comes up with a great sci-fi gimmick, clearly defines the rules by which it operates, and then (mostly) follows those rules. The audience can easily understand the film’s many complexities, in part because there’s a photographic trick where different light filters reveal who’s really who. It’s a little contrived, and calls attention to the film’s artifice, but unless you can think of a better way to keep track of a big ensemble cast’s body swapping identities, it’s hard to criticize. Jardin backed himself into a narrative corner and came up with a respectable exit strategy. Meanwhile, cinematographer Kevin Fletcher takes advantage of every excuse he’s got to turn this movie into a bit of a phantasmagoria (there’s the giallo influence again).
It’s not all wine and roses. “It’s What’s Inside” has a manic energy that makes the film difficult to embrace or even understand in the first act, as Jardin tries to introduce all the characters and quickly loses track of who’s who, why it matters and what their connections are. Ironically, it’s only when the film switches these characters’ identities that they become clearly defined, which speaks highly of this cast’s skill at replicating each other’s performances and mannerisms. There’s also a twist which eventually contradicts information the audience was explicitly given. It’s the one time Jardin’s script breaks the rules, and he barely gets away with it. But he does get away.
“It’s What’s Inside” has some quirks that don’t quite work, but the minutiae holds up remarkably well and the broad sweep is addictively acidic. This is a smart, absorbing sci-fi thriller with an intriguing hook, a clear point of view and questions that excite the imagination. It’s easy to love a mean-spirited film like “It’s What’s Inside,” even if you don’t always love what’s inside.
“It’s What’s Inside” is now streaming on Netflix.
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