From Freaky Friday to All of Me or 17 Again, there’s a long list of body-swapping movies to watch. Now Greg Jardin’s film It’s What’s Inside on Netflix is a fun, twisty and clever addition to the genre.
With an ensemble cast that includes Brittany O’Grady, James Morosini, Gavin Leatherwood, Nina Bloomgarden, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Reina Hardesty, Devon Terrell, David Thompson and Madison Davenport, It’s What’s Inside brings estranged friend together for a pre-wedding party, with a twist. When Forbes (Thompson) arrives with a “game” in a suitcase, a body-swapping device, things take a turn.
Without spoiling the story, we’ll tease that as everyone switches bodies, they try to figure out who’s who. Some are loving this body-swapping break from their own lives, while others have more concerns. But there’s no doubting that this game has severe consequences.
“I had been trying to get this other movie made, this like $10 million movie made for like all almost a decade, and I basically was not able to get it financed, and at the end of that, I was like, ‘I need to write a one location movie that can be made for as little money as humanly possible,'” Jardin told Yahoo Canada about the starting point for his film. “So I just kind of came up with the constraints of one night, one house.”
Jardin had an idea about someone bringing a suitcase to a party, and something in that suitcase should have a “genre feel.”
“I just played the game Werewolf, aka Mafia the party game, for the first time, so … the seemingly high stakes of a party game were fresh in my mind, and I toyed around with a bunch of things that could be in the suitcase,” Jardin said. “Came up with a body swap idea, and I ideated on it for a few months, and it was really once I came up with the big first turn that happens that I got really excited, and I thought it would be a fresh take on the body-swab genre.”
A fresh take on the body-swapping genre is something Jardin absolutely achieved with It’s What’s Inside, with the filmmaker describe the movie as “anxiety chic,” also the perfect terms for the film. From the unpredictability in the story, to the pulsating score, the film really has the audience leaning into the anxiety in a really satisfying way.
“The whole idea was for the feel, the camera movement, the sound design, the editing, to also just give the audience the experience of what it’s like to be an anxious person,” Jardin said.
“But hopefully, I want it to be a fun ride, which is why I’ve been describing it as anxiety chic. It makes you anxious, but sort of in a fun way that keeps you engaged, was the hope.”
While this is impressively Jardin’s first feature, his music video work has proven to be some of the best in the industry, including the video for Joey Ramone’s “New York City.”
For It’s What’s Inside Jardin also had the support of executive producer Coleman Domingo, and his husband Raúl, who’s also a producer on the film.
“I love those guys,” Jardin said. “The movie would not have happened without them.”
“One of our producers, Kate [Andrews], had gotten the script years ago. … She ended up being hired to work with Coleman and Raúl, she still had the script, nice enough to give it to them. They basically had seen some Netflix promos that I did and then came on board. And then it was Coleman who gave [it] to our financiers who ended up giving us the money. … At that point I had been shopping it around for like six years. Coleman also got us our casting director, Mary Vernieu who did Euphoria with him. … He just has this vibe where if he’s around you, you feel like everything is OK, and you just feel like you could be yourself and just do your best work.”
While Jardin is able to lean into tension and surprise in the film, he also achieves a really interesting evaluation of the complexities of relationships, prompting discussions about how social media specifically impacts relationships, and a “dissatisfaction with your own life.”
“A lot of that coming from looking at someone else’s projected image and projected life, and how that makes all of us feel much worse about ourselves than we did before social media,” Jardin said.
The filmmaker achieves this by having one character, Nikki (Debnam-Carey), who’s a social media influencer, while other characters are also evaluating their desires through this body-swapping story.
“The idea of an influencer is just the easiest kind of quickest go-to personification of that, someone whose essentially day-to-day life is about curing a very specific and, essentially, artificial image,” Jardin said.
“I like how the theme of the movie deals with us getting our values from screens. It’s not just social media, it’s media in general advertises pornography. Like Cyrus [Morosini] is feeding his brain all these images trying to teach himself that he wants to be with a certain type of woman that doesn’t even really exist.”
But at the core of what makes It’s What’s Inside a success if that Jardin never loses the fun in the story, while keeping your on your toes in every scene in the film.
“I really just try to make the movie that I would personally want to see,” Jardin said. “I really went through every sequence, every scene, and I was like, ‘What’s special about this scene? What’s making the scene out there engaging, or anxiety inducing, or fun?'”
“I think it was just going through and just trying to be real with myself about what would keep me engaged.”
