I have to be you – DNyuz

There’s only one good reason to make a body-swap movie. Yeah, okay, thematically they’re meant to teach us to be more empathetic and think about life in someone else’s shoes, blah, blah, blah. But a body-swap movie has one real purpose, and that’s to make us laugh when someone acts like someone else. “Freaky Friday”: A mother and her daughter switch places, and it’s funny. “13 Going on 30”: A teenage girl ends up in the body of a mean, beautiful magazine editor, and it’s funny. “Great”: A boy is in a man’s body and it makes us laugh. “Jumanji”: Four teenagers end up in the bodies of a beefcake, his sidekick, a loser and a pretty lady, and it’s hilarious.

“It’s What’s Inside” also tries to be hysterical, but with less amusing results. The premise of Greg Jardin’s comedy is relatively promising: seven twentysomething college students converge on a beautiful estate belonging to one of them, who is getting married the next day. They are going to party one last night before the wedding. Two are a couple who have had an argument; one of the boys carries a torch for one of the girls; another girl, the blonde, has become an influencer; the others now also have their own lives.

Then an eighth friend shows up, a man no one has heard from in a long time – not since a terrible and unfortunate event years earlier at a college party. He’s carrying a weird box containing a strange device that, it turns out, could lead to them trading bodies. He proposes a mafia-style party game using the box, and things get out of hand very quickly.

“It’s What’s Inside” is a bit reminiscent of the much better “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (2022), a horror comedy about a bunch of drunk, very online young people playing a crazy board game in a sprawling house. But where it zigzagged back and forth, ‘It’s What’s Inside’ plodded straight ahead. Even the twists feel obvious and not that interesting, more the fulfillment of plot points seeded early on rather than surprising twists.

The lumpiness is baffling, to be honest. This concept is promising. Part of the fault is in the casting; while half the actors give performances that are fun and quirky, the other feels like they’re reading lines, and not particularly well. A small portion of it is also in a self-consciously garish film style (weird lighting, quick cuts, freeze frames) that adds nothing to the film. Sometimes it’s distracting, or maybe even distracting.

But the roughest thing about “It’s What’s Inside” is that it simply misses what makes body-swap movies fun. There’s little humor to be found in the juxtaposition here.

It can be funny to see your own friend, someone you’ve known for years, appear behind the face of another friend. But to an outsider these differences would be quite opaque, as they are to the audience in the film. These are eight characters that are not much different from each other. Sure, one is an influencer, one seems like a stoner, one is a partygoer, one is edgy – but with so many personalities in play (personalities that remain undeveloped), it’s not only confusing but boring.

So we cannot know them well enough to know how to behave, and therefore to notice when they behave in a different way. We know we should laugh, but we haven’t been introduced to them long enough to know why. That’s a shame, because a body-swap comedy usually promises a good time. But this party isn’t really a party. Ultimately, you might wish you weren’t invited.

The post ‘It’s What’s Inside’ Review: I Gotta Be You first appeared in the New York Times.