An ambitious feature debut from writer-director Greg Jardin, It's What's Inside is an interesting and unique concept that is well-executed, but ultimately suffers from the inherent difficulty of translating the material from page to screen.
A group of friends get together for a big party, just before one of them is due to get married, and things get very interesting when one of the guests, Forbes (David Thompson), turns up with a device that can allow them all to swap bodies. He explains it as your mind being like a hard drive and this gadget simply being able to transfer the files. Everyone is freaked out, but then they start to figure out how they can have fun with it. Swapping everyone around, the aim is then for others to guess who is the real person inside the body that they are currently inhabiting. With me so far? Things are then complicated by resentments, scheming, and treachery, and it gets even more confusing when one or two people decide to lie about who they are while hidden away inside the body of someone else.
If you read that paragraph and thought it seemed very complicated then you wouldn't be wrong. Jardin tries to help viewers keep track in two ways. First of all, everyone gets a photo pinned to them once they have been identified (although that is assuming that they actually ARE the person they claim to be). Second, scenes move between showing the external personalities conversing and then, with a different visual style, the peoeple inside those bodies. It's a tricky balance to maintain, and Jardin almost makes it work. There are two main flaws, sadly.
The biggest flaw is not having enough memorable characters in what ends up being an oversized group to keep track of. I understand that Jardin needed enough people to allow for the twists, turns, and playfulness of the material, but viewers don't spend enough time with most of the characters to more easily follow their journeys, aside from Forbes and the central duo of Shelby and Cyrus, who we first see having a tense time before they get ready to head to the party.
The second flaw is an avoidance of extra tics and signifiers. It's understandable that Jardin would keep away from these things, not wanting to make the film too simplistic and implausible (because it would be harder to believe that characters were being fooled if we ourselves weren't being fooled), but this needed to be slightly simplified. For example, there's a reason why "timeloop" movies always have main events that work as time-stamp markers, and this needed some device akin to that.
Things are paced well though, there's a wonderfully "disruptive event" just over the halfway mark and a surprisingly delicious and satisfying ending, and Thompson is a great presence. It's a shame that very few of the other cast members can match him. O'Grady is decent enough as Shelby, Morosini is amusingly whiny as Cyrus, and Reina Hardesty impresses in the role of Brooke, but that's about it. Gavin Leatherwood, Nina Bloomgarden, Alycia Debnam-Carey, and Devon Terrell all just make up the numbers. There's fun to be had with Madison Davenport, but she doesn't get nearly as much screentime as she deserves.
I definitely enjoyed this, and it's a film that may well improve on multiple viewings (when you know what to keep an eye out for), but it's a shame that some of the ambition, as admirable as it is, gets in the way of what could have been a more interesting and entertaining film.
6/10
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That sounds like a story I would write.
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