It’s What’s Insidewas a hit at the Sundance Film Festival and SXSW. That’s why,according to Deadline, Netflix shelled out something in the range of $17 million for the rights. But the body-swap horror movie, directed by Greg Jardin, is complicated not by the various characters' desires, but by the fact that there are eight people to swap bodies with.
In the film, a group of college friends gathers eight years later on the night before one of them, Reuben, is set to get married. Reuben has sent everyone else away, including his fiancée, so the group can party like they used to. But then a friend they haven’t seen since school, Forbes, shows up, and he comes with a device in a suitcase that allows him toswitch everyone’s bodies. But whose bodies does everyone end up in? Well, they play the body swap game three times, and by the end, it’s much more serious than it started out.
Harmless Fun for All!
It’s What’s Inside
In the first round, there arefour pairs of body-swaps. Shelby, the girl who’s in a bad relationship with Cyrus, swaps bodies with Brooke, who does art; Nikki, the social media influencer, swaps bodies with Maya, the Buddhist; Cyrus, Shelby’s significant other, swaps bodies with Reuben, who’s getting married; and Dennis, the trust-fund baby, swaps bodies with Forbes, the one who brought the body-swapping machine in the first place.
In this round, fun is had by all, even Shelby who initially wasn’t feeling so certain. Not only do they enjoy being able to see the world through someone else’s eyes, they enjoy being able to relate to each other with different bodies. And at the end of their time in the other person’s body, they switch back into their own bodies with no problem.
Things Start to Get Serious
The goal of the second round is the same as the first: Fun! But there are several things that are different in this round. The first is Shelby ends up in Nikki’s body. Shelby’s boyfriend, Cyrus, has always wanted Nikki and Shelby knows it, so for her to end up looking like Nikki is quite a coup as far as she’s concerned.
The other thing is that Reuben, who’s in Dennis' body, wants Maya, whose body is being used by Brooke. And because neither of them are in their own bodies, they seem particularly candid with one another, which leads to the pair having sex. However, since the sex they have is up against the rail of the balcony, the rail ends up falling away while they’re in the midst of it and they, therefore, fall to the ground and die. SoDennis' body and Reuben’s brain — or spirit or essence or whatever — are dead, as are Maya’s body and Brooke’s brain.
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The other body swaps are: Dennis in Cyrus' body; Maya in Shelby’s body; Cyrus in Forbes' body; Nikki in Brooke’s body; and Forbes in Reuben’s body. But by the end of this round,Dennis and Maya don’t have bodies to go back to, and Shelby doesn’t want to move from Nikki’s body back into her own.
The Big Twist Is Revealed
In the coda, which is more like the beginning of a very screwed-up round three,Shelby and Cyrus are back in their own bodies, but the other four people are all in different bodies.Dennis is in Forbes’s body, Forbes is in Nikki’s body, Nikki is in Reuben’s body, and Maya is in Brooke’s body.But there’s another wrinkle. It turns out Forbes isn’t Forbes. The whole time Forbeswas at the party,he was actually Forbes' sister, Beatrice.So, when Forbes switched into Nikki’s body, it was actually Beatrice switching into Nikki’s body.The real Forbes is, in fact, in Beatrice’s body, and it’s only when he shows up after Beatrice has absconded with Nikki’s body that the others learn this.
The reason for Beatrice being in Forbes' body goes back to their time in college. Beatrice had “episodes,” and on the night of Dennis' birthday party in college, Dennis said that Beatrice had another one. This landed Beatrice in a psychiatric hospital under suicide watch. Years later, Forbes decided to show Beatrice the body-swap machine that he and his team were working on in an effort to re-connect and boost her morale.
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Forbes and Beatrice swapped bodies and Beatrice took off with Forbes' body and the suitcase with the body-swap machine, which is how she ended up at Reuben’s party looking like Forbes, and later she managed to take off with Nikki’s body. Plus,in the first round, Beatrice was in Dennis’s body, and while she was there, she transferred his money into an offshore account for her own use.
As for everyone else that remained in others' bodies, Dennis is fairly circumspect, Nikki is furious, and Maya is looking at the experience in avery Zen way. So, while four people are no longer in their real bodies, at least three out of four are kind of okay with it. In the end, though, Beatrice played them all. She got away with the body-swap machine, Dennis’s money, and Nikki’s body, so it appears that if there’s any “winner” of this game, it’s the person no one knew was there: Beatrice.
