IT’S WHAT’S INSIDE

A Note: It’s What’s Inside is best watched when you don’t know anything going in. It may seem counter productive for me to write this but maybe don’t read this review until after you’ve seen it. It’s fun, that’s all you need to know at this stage. 

Come back and give this a read after.

Now, the review…

We’ve had a few of these kinds of films recently. The high school/college reunion, in a remote house, simmering tensions between various guests who, at one point or anther have to play a game.

In the last couple of years films like The Blackening and Bodies Bodies Bodies have taken this premise and ran with it to great success.

Here, the reunion is a wedding party. The house is the childhood home of groom to be Reuben (Devon Terrell). The simmering tensions… I don’t really have time to go into all of them here. And the game. This is, of course, the crux of the film. And it’s a good one.

The game is brought to the party by silicon valley tech developer Forbes (David W. Thompson), something of an outcast from the group, after a high school party led to him being expelled. Forbes carries with him a mysterious suitcase, which harbours a device which will allow each of the guests to be transported to another guests body.

The game: work out who is inhabiting each body. Last one standing wins.

It’s a great premise, and the film employs a couple of tricks to help you keep track of who is who. 

Firstly, when a correct guess is made, the found out player has to wear a polaroid showing who they actually are. There are also moments where a red filter is placed on screen. When a red filter shows their true self is revealed, when there is no filter we see their disguise.

This idea of RGB filters revealing something secret is a theme throughout the film and it really works here. Each of these characters holds a secret. Each of them holds resentment towards another. And the slow reveal of these - of who they really are - is really well done.

Because in reality, even when they are in their true bodies, they are all hiding there true selves. The game, by displacing them, just brings those true selves closer and closer to the surface.

The problem I had, however, was just with the sheer number of characters, and other than 3 or 4 at the start of the film we didn’t really spend enough time with them to learn who they are.

So even with the red filter, and even with the polaroid images, there were large periods during their first round of the game where I was still a little lost at exactly who everyone was meant to be. I don’t normally advocate for films being longer, but I did feel that It’s What’s Inside would have benefitted from an extra 10 minutes in the first act to allow us to fully get to know who each of the characters were, before we started displacing them into each others bodies. When half of the point is working out who each of them are now, it would be helpful to know who each of them was in the first place.

The characters themselves are, mostly, pretty unlikeable. Pretentious, or self absorbed, or just downright irritating. Which in this kind of film works, because when bad things inevitably start happening to them, it’s nice to see them get some kin of comeuppance. 

And, as I’ve said of other films recently, what makes this work particularly well, is that we know these people. Each one of the them is a portrayal of someone we have met, and probably despised, in our day to day life. They might be exaggerated, yes, but we recognise them.

The trust fund kid, living off his parents money but without any discernible talent. The wannabe influencer, blessed with good looks but no obvious personality, virtue signalling for likes and follows. The one who made it big, desperate for the respect and admiration of his old school mates.

You want something bad to happen to them almost immediately after meeting them.

The only one with anything close to a redeeming characteristic is Brittany O’Grady’s Shelby. In a failing relationship with Cyrus (James Morosini) - a man to whom the description of “average” would be to flatter him - she doesn’t particularly want to attend the party. She is unhappy, downtrodden, but seemingly the most normal of all of them. But even then, her unhappiness begets a jealousy of the others good fortune.

Narratively, there are some themes it touches upon - the morality of what you might do with someone else’s body for example - without delving into them quite as much as it should. And I always had the sense that it wasn’t quite making the most of its own excellent premise.

This is director Greg Jardins first feature film, and it is an exceptionally assured debut, but I do think a director with slightly more experience may have just been able to get a little bit more out of it.

Ultimately though, It’s What’s Inside is a really fun, twisty, sci-fi thriller. It’s perhaps not as thematically deep as it could be, but if you’re just after something fun to pass the time this is one of the best you’ll find this year. 

It has a brilliant premise, and some traumatic events happening to unlikable characters. What more can you ask for, really?