Every era has its subgenre of movies involving young people in peril. Usually it’s horror, but sometimes, as in the case of the new Netflix movie It’s What’s Inside, thriller is the more appropriate genre. For our current era, this seems to be “crazy shit happens during party games in remote locations” movies. The list of recent films roughly described this way includes Bodies Bodies Bodies, Blink Twice, Talk to Me and Truth or Dare. If those films are named in the order of their effectiveness, at least for this critic, then It’s What’s Inside jumps right to the front of the line with its wicked narrative cleverness and genuinely new approach to this sort of frame story.
Unfortunately, Greg Jardin’s film is also the sort of experience that benefits from knowing only a minimum about it, just enough to hook you. That’s not unfortunate for the viewer, but for a critic attempting to discuss it. So if you don’t want to learn any more than what’s already been revealed about It’s What’s Inside, it might be best to peel off at this point, though rest assured, only the most indispensable plot nuggets will follow.
It’s wedding time for Reuben and Sophia, tagged as #reuphia on Instagram in a film that is very conversant with the conventions of social media. Reuben (Devon Terrell) has invited his side of the friend group to a unisex buck’s night at his family’s – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – remote mansion in the woods. Already bickering before they get there are Shelby (Brittany O’Grady) and Cyrus (James Morosini), as she had reluctantly submitted to wearing a wig during sex, as per his fantasy, only her timing was off, as she tried to surprise him and caught him sneaking in some porn on his laptop. They join the rest of the guests who have already started partying: Maya (Nina Bloomgarden), Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood), Brooke (Reina Hardesty) and Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey).
The missing ingredient, not yet arrived, is the one they all sort of fear: Forbes (David Thompson), a hard partier who was expelled from their university after a night that lives on in cautionary legend, in which he got into a fight with Dennis and got his teenaged sister too drunk to stand up. They then lost track of Forbes, knowing only that he might have become some sort of tech bro out in California. To the rest of the guests’ great surprise, Reuben summoned him for this momentous occasion.
Forbes arrives with an inscrutable smile on this face and an old-school pea green suitcase that never leaves his side. It turns out Forbes and his team have been developing a technology that he doesn’t want to explain, only to demonstrate. It involves strapping electrodes to your forehead, which seems ominous, but Forbes assures them the experience is painless and will last only 20 seconds. At least at first, before they can continue for longer if they like.
During this first taste of the technology, the friends are dumbfounded almost to the point of speechlessness. Their utterances that follow are grammatically incorrect sentence fragments. You see, for those 20 seconds, their minds were temporarily transported into one of the other bodies in the room. If this film’s predecessor was Bodies Bodies Bodies, perhaps this is Minds Minds Minds.
You can probably imagine some of what comes next from this basic premise. Many things, you won’t. And it’s not the kind of movie where you jump out way ahead of the characters. You’re learning this radical reimagining of a social framework among friends at the same pace that they are.
What you do need to know, and what can be revealed in a review, is the boundlessly entertaining way that Jardin has presented what follows in the narrative. As a writer, Jardin holds himself to high standards of connectivity between the strands of plot he introduces, and there are many. You can go back and re-watch parts of It’s What’s Inside – and you may be inclined to do just that – looking for ways Jardin contradicts himself, and he never does.
He’s also gone beyond the minimum required for character development in this sort of film. Even though you’re always supposed to get the dynamics in a friend group like this, of which there are quite a few, most films would be hamstrung by plot mechanics and shortchange character as a result. These are stock characters, to a degree, but we get enough of a sense of their individuality to see their personality pop up somewhere else – the Instagram star here, the new-age flake there, the guy who’s always calling everyone “bro” and “dawg” over here. The reconfigurations required by the story are as much of a challenge for the actors as the person writing their dialogue.
It’s What’s Inside is ecstatically fun. A lot of that is traceable to Jardin’s lively visual sense. Jardin is his own editor, and he uses frenetic layerings of shots in a manner judicious enough not to be assaultive. A lot of talented filmmakers can do things like that, but here is something that seems uniquely his own. In a couple scenes where characters sling bullshit, usually regarding an event in their collective past that different people remember differently, Jardin uses still photos of characters in the scene, and quickly repositions them into humorous new poses or scenarios in keeping with the improvisational quality of the characters’ storytelling. In function it’s reminiscent of Michael Pena’s stories in the original Ant-Man, but formally, it’s its own thing. The multiple imaginings of what happened in that fight between Forbes and Dennis, especially as details get added and clarified, is particularly fruitful in that regard.
Okay, that’s enough dancing around spoilers for today. All you really need to know is that It’s What’s Inside is a gas. It’s enthralling genre filmmaking. See it.
It’s What’s Inside is now streaming on Netflix