Original ideas in Hollywood appear to be a gradually dying breed with the influx of “requel” movies, comic book flicks, and anything else churned out of the film industry machine; yet, Greg Jardin’s feature filmmaking debut, It’s What’s Inside, takes what most adore and love about the popular subgenres and experiments with what works best—young people, science-fiction shenanigans, suspenseful mystery, plot reveals and twists.
It’s What’s Inside is its own machine of cross-genre storytelling comprised of dark comedy, mystery, science-fiction, and thriller elements. Essentially, Jardin’s film is the next great body-swap narrative that follows a specific catalog of similar titles, e.g., Face/Off, Scooby-Doo, Get Out, the Jumanji movies, Everything Everywhere All at Once, etc. In the larger picture, involving several characters switching bodies, the narrative also employs a “who’s who” board game scenario, popularized with Clue, Guess Who, Werewolf/Mafia, and, for the sake of the discussion, Among Us and Glass Onion.
Despite its October release on Netflix, the film isn’t categorized as horror, and rightfully so. Rather, It’s What’s Inside navigates what it means to be quite literally in another’s shoes, yet also highlights the outcomes of what that looks like. It gives the impression that the filmmaker himself is toying with the scientific method to reach inside the human soul and find common ground.
Jardin’s Machine
Jardin’s screenwriting has the most brilliant structure in a science-fiction film since this year’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. He juxtaposes reality with identity by showcasing what is on the surface of a character and then exposing their inner self. The arrival of Forbes Blomquist (David Thompson) and his suitcase is a great catalyst for the narrative. His expulsion from college, along with friend Reuben Fletcher’s (Devon Terrell) mother’s passing, both taking place eight years prior, is too much of a coincidence. Still, they profoundly help with the backstory.
The outcast who returns to the friend group is a nice trope that reminds me all too much of Todd Phillips’s Hangover and, eerily enough, Tim Story’s The Blackening. They’re evidence of the uncanny and the mystery thereof that arises as a result of that presence. It’s What’s Inside is a well-written narrative, although I feel as if two or three supporting characters are left underdeveloped.
Colman Domingo (Euphoria, Rustin, The Color Purple, Sing Sing) produces alongside his husband, Raúl Domingo, and reunites with his Fear the Walking Dead castmate, Alycia Debnam-Carey, for this film. The Netflix title also marks Brittany O’Grady’s newest acting credit following her appearances in The White Lotus season 1 and Prime Video’s The Consultant. Casting director Mary Vernieu brings in fantastic talent, and having seen her past contributions to casting—e.g., I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scary Movie, Scooby-Doo, The Last Jedi, Knives Out, Glass Onion, Love Lies Bleeding, and Alien: Romulus—, there is little reason to doubt her choices.
Technical Cogs
As a visual effects artist, Jardin’s red, blue, and green color filters are creative, with red exhibiting who a person truly is. Director of Photography Kevin Fletcher captures and follows character movement to display personality. His one-take shot of Shelby Jansen (Brittany O’Grady) and Cyrus Baum (James Morosini) entering the Fletcher home and reuniting with old friends establishes everyone without interruption. By circling them a few times, Jardin defines who they are and what they represent, not just as archetypes but as human beings with meaning.
Composer Andrew Hewitt’s soundtrack is fine, such as the grandiose score when Blomquist first enters the Fletcher home, the score when the character first switches on his suitcase machine, the curious Willy Wonka-like music when two characters debate over whose body contains Blomquist’s mind, the whimsical score as a beautiful woman approaches two of the men, and the ticking clock scoring when the friends’ time runs thin. The song selections are great as well, such as The Walker Brothers’ “In My Room” when the group initially spirals or Bobby Rydell’s “Forget Him” during a final sequence when authorities force their way into the household.
Thematic Cogs
As the film progresses, viewers witness the downward spiral and re-familiarize characters are in the shoes of an Other. This theme is universally applicable, which I noted not too long ago at Fantastic Fest. In the late French psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle’s In Praise of Risk, spiraling is “the movement that seems best to describe our relation to the past, and even more, to trauma.” At the bottom of this spiral is the possibility of self-destruction, with TRAUMA illustrated in bright reddish-pink colors. Characters see themselves in a new light, and it’s due to the substitution of both the mind and the soul.
Gender-Fluidity and the Female Gothic
By any means, It’s What’s Inside is not horrific but is still rooted in horror’s predecessor: Gothicism. Jardin juxtaposes characters at the top of the social hierarchy with those at the bottom. Reuben’s family mansion itself is a character that exhibits not just self-reflection but also architectural symbolism. Literature professor Carol Margaret Davison explains this best in her essay, “Gothic Architectonics: The Poetics and Politics of Gothic Space”, citing the concepts of grottophilia and toweromania.
On the one hand, grottophilia is defined as “the compulsion to seek out and investigate diminishing space [as if] a return to the darkness of the womb”, whereas toweromania is the “peculiar compulsion to ascend, construct, or reside in towers [equivalent to] some insidious form of power.” Toweromania seems to go as far back as the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis, while Jesus Christ’s vanishing from His tomb is an example of grottophilia. Jardin’s film does this so well, with metallic statues of Fletcher’s mother’s vagina exhibited on the ground level of their family estate.
Production designer Terry Watson does splendid work with the Fletcher home in attempts to transcend binaries. Here, the Gothicism works feasibly, with the group’s attempts to unite their different identities and transform meaning. Not only do they discover differences in race and temperaments, but also sexuality.
Desire of the Other
The screenplay makes the point that social media exploits subjects, urging them to take on trends, such as hashtags. Suggesting that social media is a “vessel” poses an interesting argument, given that the film also focuses on the human body as a literal vessel for the mind and the soul. Jardin allows characters to transfer their consciousnesses from body to body, almost like hacking into another person’s social media account. Blomquist’s machine serves to open doorways to different identities, akin to each room in Fletcher’s home possessing their own look and personality.
With that, subjectivity becomes objectivity, and otherness yields sameness. The machine offers the opportunity for “shared experiences” among characters. According to South Korean-German cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han’s The Expulsion of the Other, Sameness consists of movement without experience, and that leads to perception without insight and gathering of information without knowledge. He asserts that knowledge is synonymous with understanding; it’s a lengthy process that requires maturation, a characteristic we are losing more of today.
Han writes, “It is only from conflicts that stable relationships and identities ensue. A person grows and matures by working through conflict. … Today, everyone is somehow on their own with themselves, with their suffering, with their fears. Suffering is privatized and individualized”. Jardin appears to intentionally grant so few characters their satisfactory ending because they do not fracture the connections they have with Others.
Bodily Autonomy
Consequently, there are a couple of male characters who are urged into adultery, prompted by their male gaze on women in their group. The men treat their new bodies like being logged into a new social media account. As Han states, “[R]eality is no longer a picture, a pleasurable sight”. The women of the film could be the dominant figures because of this, because “being gazed upon is the central aspect of Being-in-the-world. World is gaze. [C]onsider life from the perspective of the Other … to listen to the Other and respond.”
Conversely, occupying the body of an Other means crossing boundaries. Jardin illustrates the lack of consent had when placing oneself in an Other’s shoes and the acts committed when this happens. Instead of embodying (no pun intended) the “My body, my choice” statement, characters are offered a level of freedom to intoxicate an Other’s body, to make love and make out, to reveal their genitals to the room, and more. This also means possessing fingerprints and face cards to bypass security, which, again, just means invading another person’s social identity.
Han cites foreignness as “the fundamental feeling that defines being and existence.” To enter an Other’s body requires absolute invitation and consent. As French philosopher Jacques Derrida states in Of Hospitality, “Without this right [to hospitality], a new arrival can only be introduced ‘in my home,’ in the host’s ‘at home,’ as a parasite, a guest who is wrong, illegitimate, clandestine, liable to expulsion of arrest.”
Reflecting Through Empathy
Look at me. I am a different person.
Shelby Jansen
As an editor, Jardin presents his characters in a manner that places them together but still divides them in one way or another. His uses of flashbacks are remarkable representations of the truth. More so, split-screen imagery is used to outline single characters, and oftentimes, these splits are repositioned to have characters face each other as if holding a mirror to their—or an Other’s—faces. I enjoy the Brady Bunch-like sequence as the group first experiences the effects of the machine, a lovely example of the cast’s ability to act off of each other’s characters.
Mirrors are also physically employed in place of these metaphors. The shot of Baum (and the group) listening to Fletcher poignantly speak of his late mother—with Baum’s back turned to a mirror, itself displaying a reflection of Fletcher and behind him, Blomquist—is a perfect imagery of perfection and empathy. Although, it also looks like an image of the male gaze of the male gaze of the male gaze. In another scene, one character sees their “face” in a shattered mirror, indicative not of a wholesome experience but of pieces of information. In his critical text, The Society of the Spectacle, French philosopher Guy Debord writes that our windows into the world only show fragments of reality.
Ultimately, what Jardin unveils are the lies characters tell themselves. Nikki Vee (Alycia Debnam-Carey) thinks they are looking at each other’s potential and cultural differences, and Blomquist claims their newfound perspective contributes to the human condition. Yet, that’s just not true. The group’s “experiences” in each other’s bodies are merely windows, lenses into selves, like the colored filters of red, blue, and green.
Forbes’s List: Performances and Character Developments
Given that It’s What’s Inside is a body-swap film with major repercussions, I will not brush on any spoilers, specifically those of the final act.
O’Grady’s establishment as the protagonist, Shelby Jansen, is an anxious role compared to others. She learns that risk-taking is a risk in itself, and it is nice to see that personality adopted by other actors. She starts the film approaching her romantic partner in the bedroom, her feet on the carpet like feet in the sand. Jansen treads sand as if walking on the path of the Other, not as fluid as water but not solid enough to represent anything concrete. O’Grady performs as pristinely as Debnam-Carey does, both properly utilizing space to deliver up to perfection.
Similarly, Jansen’s boyfriend, Cyrus Baum, is risk-averse and arguably the most awkward member of the friend group. His Instagram handle, “cyrusthevyrus,” is a nice allusion to John Malkovich’s villain character in 1997’s Con Air. It only further gives me the impression that he is sort of an antagonist. The actors adopting Jansen’s and Baum’s personalities throughout the film give way to some intriguing performances; likewise, when he butts heads with Dennis Markowitz (Gavin Leatherwood) in at least two instances.
Thompson’s role as the “Dungeon Master” is manipulative because it permits the character to take control behind the scenes of the story or in front of others’ eyes. Blomquist is a personality who is seemingly chill and lax, and the actors adopt that quite well, especially towards the end of the film.
Final Thoughts on Greg Jardin’s It’s What’s Inside
It’s What’s Inside is a fantastical and innovative body-swap feature that emphasizes the limits of owning a body and a self. Through Jardin’s direction, it isn’t enough that we accept each other as human beings but ourselves as well. The Netflix film suggests that we give ourselves up to comfortability no matter our physical body or social standing. The only way we can be at peace with Others is to exist truthfully within ourselves and the ongoing transformative machine. Overall, expect an incredibly appealing rollercoaster of a sci-fi flick with a future of probable excellence.
It’s What’s Inside streams via Netflix starting October 4th!
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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[…] original work of art and should be seen as such. Like Greg Jardin’s feature filmmaking debut, It’s What’s Inside, Flying Lotus’s film is bathed in color. Without giving away the whole narrative, green […]