If it’s what’s inside that counts, why are y’all fighting over the best bodies?

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TSF Showcase 2024-42
It’s What’s Inside
Directed by Greg Jardin

When mainstream creators take a crack at body swapping, they typically explore more surface level ramifications of the concept. A problem for the characters to solve, a bonding exercise for characters to grow closer, a zany situation that gives way to ample comedy, that sort of thing. These are all important elements of a body swap— what could be more awkward and eye-opening than trying to be someone else, and trying to live someone else’s life? However, if one wants to get something a bit deeper, on another level, they need to lurk through the gulags, and part of TSF Showcase is about just that. Finding weird or remarkable examples of the TSF and body swap genre, raising their successes, analyzing their shortcomings, and showing them off.

…But not this week! This week I’m tackling a mainstream feature length film that was released on Netflix this month, It’s What’s Inside. 

The premise is pretty simple. Eight college friends gather at a mansion to celebrate before one of their friends gets married. This is supposed to be a normal night of drinking, partying, and recreational drug use, but then the resident weird friend comes in with a body swapping machine in a suitcase. This makes this party exponentially more interesting, but as things progress and people start pairing off, relationship tension billows and grows. …All before a twist changes what type of body swap story this is and the tensions only rise.

As an avid body swap fan, I naturally have a lot of thoughts about this film, but I’m not going into my usual beat-by-beat breakdown— it’s a 100 minute movie and Wikipedia has a plot synopsis. I’ll cut to the chase and say I think it’s really good and encourage you to watch it yourself if you haven’t already, as I will be spoiling everything.

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Part 1: Fostering a Firm Foundation

The first thing that I admire about It’s What’s Inside is the set-up and setting for its story. The archetypical body swap film tends to be very intimate and be largely about living one’s life. There is good reason for this, but it is not the only way to use body swapping as a narrative tool. IWI sees eight people swapping bodies for short lengths of time, a few hours, freely, in an isolated location without needing to worry about living their lives, instead focusing on the act of being. The act of embodying another form.

This more playful approach works particularly well considering who the characters are. A bunch of people in their late twenties or early thirties who were friends back in college who have not seen each other, at least in-person, in years. This gives them a level of familiarity and understanding of each other. They all intimately know each other’s schtick and generally trust each other. There are no conflicts about age, health, or about animosity toward others, and while this can be seen as the denial of opportunities, it also allows the story to maintain more focus. Not every body swap story needs to deal with everything that comes from a new body, and I would rather see a work pursue what it wants to do rather than only hit each note once.

The cast is also pretty well constructed, giving each character a discernible schtick that is built on as backstories are laid out and tensions run hot. Cyrus is the non-committal, kinda schmucky, ‘soft protagonist.’ Dennis is the more abrasive, tough guy ‘bro’ type. Forbes is a Silicon Valley tech bro. Reuben is a rich guy trying to make the most of his last night as a single dude before his wedding. Shelby is a girl with body image issues who’s stuck in a dead-end relationship. Brooke is the endearing art girl. Maya is the free spirit non-Asian Buddhist. While Nikki is an influencer who gets by on her looks and takes pride in her work. There’s enough friction between the characters for conflicts to easily form and there to be an allure to swapping them around, but they socialize and interact with a well-worn level of familiarity.

I also really need to praise the way that the characters react to Forbes’s body swapping machine. They start with hesitation as Forbes deliberately does not explain what the machine does beyond saying it is part of a ‘game’. He provides them with a quick 20 second long swap to show them how this all works, and I love everything about this initial swap. The framing of all eight characters, showing their overlapping reactions all at once while the machine sits in the center. Each of their reactions are given equal importance as they slowly realize what happened in similar yet different ways. It’s loud, hectic, a bit horrific, deliberately disorientating, and overwhelming. 

There is some reluctance afterwards, but after having this carrot dangled in front of them, knowing they are among the first people in the world to experience body swapping, they can’t resist a proper attempt. Still, they are reluctant to do this, to just hop into a friend’s body, so they need to set a goal, make it into a game, a guessing game of who is who.

They are slow to adapt to this, just vibing with the act of being at first, sharing an obligatory mirror scene. But after people start figuring out who is who, they wander off, explore this art exhibit of a mansion, and just exist in their bodies for a while. Some pair up because they know who they are inside, and some pair off because of who they appear to be. 

After this, they swap back, have some drinks, reflect on what they went through, and drop some lines that really convey to me that the creative team fully understood the appeal and magnitude of the body swap genre. 

• “It’s like there’s no drug that can compare with the high of being in someone else’s body.” 
• “Each body you’re going into is giving you another piece of the human condition.” 
• “After a while, you want to constantly switch [bodies].”
• “Even this game is important. Like, playing this, becoming a different ethnicity, could change people’s worldviews.”

These are all pretty familiar lines that people who are into body swapping have seen or written at some point, but just hearing them bounced back and forth like this in the span of less than a minute was surreal. 

Then, after hyping themselves up, everybody is a lot more eager and adventurous, leading into the second round. They get blazed to make the experience feel more vivid and surreal, start immersing themselves into their bodies more, largely giving up on the guessing game of who’s who. …And start chasing old flames. This is an allegedly common thing when old friends get together— people hook up, they have a good time, and maybe possibly fuck in one of the empty bedrooms, or some place secluded yet open. And when you throw body swapping into the mix, people have more incentive to do this, as their options are expanded exponentially. Attraction comes from personality and physicality and if you don’t like one combination, they very well may like the other. It’s why a ‘body swapping shipping simulator’ is a good idea that someone should make. …At least before you realize the exponential volume of pairings you’d need to write and illustrate.

This more sexual approach could spur conflict if characters find their assigned bodies unerotic, and cannot immerse themselves in the roleplaying, as happens with Cyrus in Forbes’s body. But most characters are too fixated on living in the moment, propelled by a steady buzz, to really worry about this sort of thing. Which then leads Reuben in Dennis and Brooke in Maya to pair off and do some balcony banging. It can be seen as Reuben, who’s getting married in a few hours, as being unfaithful, but it is an example of characters making the most of the experience. It feels right, it feels natural.

…And then the story completely changes what type of body swap story it’s telling by killing off two of its characters!

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Part 2: Panic, Pettiness, and Penetration

Right at the one hour mark, shit gets read as Reuben in Dennis and Brooke in Maya both fall off the roof and die. Rueben lands on a dangerous sculpture and is impaled in a dozen different places while Brooke lands on the concrete, her innards crushed like a bag of grapes. Just like that, two of the eight people here are dead. Two minds are lost, two bodies are corpses. There are no ghosts, no mental backups recorded in the body swap machine, they are just gone.

In writing this, I have been wracking my brain thinking of good examples of a story that does something quite like this. Stories about old wizards using body swapping to achieve immortality are an almost century old concept, if not older. (More on that next week.) Sometimes a two person body swap can result in one person dying, forcing the other to live a new life. And a body swapping serial killer… I mean, they made a slasher comedy about that back in 2020, Freaky. (If you think that’d make for a good showcase subject, let me know.) I’m sure this premise has been done before— everything has in the modern era— but this is still a bold and striking direction for a body swap story to take. Especially when the machine still works.

Everybody takes this death hard, as they should, with anger, shock, confusion, and droning acceptance, but as that fades they must address how to solve this problem. The most practical solution is to just swap back the four people with an available mind and body, while putting Dennis in Reuben’s body and Maya in Brooke’s body. Except that’s not how they see it.

Dennis was comfortable in his life, proud of his tattoo-rich body, and coasting through life on his trust fund. He had more giving for him than most people, and has been exposed to fewer stressors. So the idea that he lost everything… does not sit well with him. He feels like something is cosmically wrong with the universe, that he is being signaled out, and wants to take it out on others. He believes, at least subconsciously, that his suffering can be absolved with the mutual suffering of others. It’s a selfish way to view the situation, but also one that I can fully believe, as that’s how some people behave when struck by tragedy. 

Same with how Maya breaks down after finding herself in Shelby’s body. Everything she built for herself across 30-ish years was lost, and now she copes with it in her own way by rationalizing this as a type of reincarnation. Presenting the loss of her body not as an unfortunate accident, but something more, something with meaning behind it. To her, this is not a cosmic wrong, but a cosmic intervention.

This situation could be resolved by someone with a way with words. …Instead the characters wind up fighting about some relationship drama from a decade ago, fight fire with fire, and ruin things for everybody. Dennis calls the cops and frames Cyrus for murder to fuck up his life. Forbes runs away with the body swapper, and after some of the unpleasant truths aired, characters start breaking off into factions. Some refuse to swap back, want to stay this way, or want to get out of this predicament by upgrading to new bodies. Tensions are sky high, the cops are gonna come and crash the party in a few minutes, the machine (allegedly) only has one more charge, and only Forbes and Shelby know how to operate it. 

The ensuing twenty minutes are a mad rush, as there is no good way to tell what will happen, who will end up as who, and how characters will fight or join up in the end. Bridges are scorched, decade-long relationships are shattered as intense threats are made, and plans are countered with counter-plans and counter-counter plans before the sensory overload of a finale. There are too many elements to keep track of, too many noises, and just as a conclusion draws near… it cuts to black and jumps into an epilogue. …Or rather coda. 

And this is where things get extra interesting.

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Part 3: The Golden TSF Witch

Leading up to the ending, my big criticism with It’s What’s Inside was its reluctance to feature any male-to-female or female-to-male swaps. I can understand why, as that is a different dimension to acknowledge. The ability for one to exist as another gender in addition to another person, and have all the new bits that come with a new sex. It’s a lot to tackle with a story, especially with a cast of eight, and if a creator wants to avoid tackling that to maintain focus, then… so be it. But during the final ten minutes of the story, the film reveals it was a TSF story all along!

It is revealed that the regularly mentioned Beatrice— younger sister of Forbes and ex of Dennis— actually switched bodies with Forbes prior to arriving at the mansion. She was friends with them back during their college years, so she knows them about as well as Forbes would and, being his sister, she understands Forbes’s mannerisms well.

On one hand, this is the type of twist that puts the whole movie into a new perspective. Forbes’s sometimes awkward delivery, selective secrecy, swap choices— really everything ‘he’ says and does throughout the film— can now be read in a different light. It’s a great idea and makes use of how, when body swapping is afoot, you can never be sure that someone is who they say they are. On the other hand… Beatrice’s characterization is a bit questionable. 

Beatrice is described by the main case as this manic teenage girl who becomes obsessed with Dennis while he is in college. Then, after Beatrice is dumped by Dennis and is belittled for her mental issues, she has a ‘bad episode’. The fallout of this sees her sent to a mental institution where her rage billows and her condition worsens. Forbes then tries to reconnect with her using the body swap machine he invented… and she immediately hatches a plan to exact revenge upon the people who ruined her life.

Beatrice is a female character defined by her relationship to men and who could unflatteringly be described as a ‘psycho bitch ex-girlfriend little sister’. I would like to combat this description, but throughout the story, she never presents herself as Beatrice. Her background, motives, and actions are described by other people and she is unable to prove that she is more than a villain.

As for her grand master plan… she’s pretty much just winging it throughout the story. After establishing the body swapping machine, her first major course of action is to get into Dennis’s phone and transfer his entire $2.5 million trust fund into an offshore account. An act of revenge on the trust fund kid who romantically betrayed her, stealing what he values second-most after his body. …But as an accountant, I need to call bullshit on this plan.

Any bank would be suspicious of a major personal account being zeroed out like that and call someone, and if the account owner is dead, they definitely wouldn’t approve the transfer. Furthermore, if this was a trust fund, it would be a balanced investment made up of stocks, securities, fixed income, and cash for spending purposes. Which you cannot transfer willy-nilly. This isn’t like using Zelle or wiring money to your friends in the Caymans. Banks have security measures specifically to prevent things like this from happening. …Well, maybe not the body swapping, but they’re working on that.

Okay, but what about after that? What was Beatrice’s plan? Well, she has a conversation with Dennis where he says that he and Reuben got Forbes expelled during college by telling on the dean, which was related to Beatrice’s very bad episode. This maybe influences her decision to put Reuben into Dennis and Dennis into Cyrus, while taking Reuben’s body for herself. Except I don’t think this can be called a ‘plan’ as her primary course of action throughout this round is to get high. Her ‘plan’ to run away in Reuben’s body with the machine is self-explanatory. While her decision to steal Nikki’s body is… just sensible. No offense to Beatrice’s body’s actress, but she is made to look like a high schooler in this movie despite being in her late twenties and done growing. You don’t need to explain why she wants to be a thirst trap.

I guess what I’m getting at here is that this twist ultimately works, but it strikes me as an idea that was added after the core story was worked on. A last minute twist to tie the story together and give the impression of greater depth. When, practically speaking, the story would function the same if Forbes was always himself.

That all being said, do I think this makes It’s What’s Inside a good TSF story? …No. 

While Beatrice in Forbes/Dennis/Reuben is a woman acting as a man, she is fixated on her mission, on playing a role, and there is never any insight into how she views these bodies. We don’t even know if she likes it or views it as a means to an end.

When Nikki ends up in Reuben’s body in the coda, she freaks out, pats over her new self, and says fuck a lot, but then disappears from the movie. She’s a White woman freaking out over being in a Black man’s body for a variety of reasons, and her side of the story ends a few seconds later.

Then there is Forbes in Beatrice, who is introduced as a bitter and angry firecracker whose road rage, vulgar vernacular, and violent disposition are meant to be at odds with the small, cute body he is contained in. His reaction to this whole affair is natural, having lost his life, his prized belonging, and probably a lot more. He is clearly deeply affected by this body swap, by being in the body of a woman, his sister, and stomps around like he should be bigger and taller than he is. But all he does is get pissed, beat up who he thinks is his sister, and explain what really happened. 

It’s What’s Inside is a TSF story by definition, but it lacks the intention, exploration, and spirit for it to be a good TSF story.

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Part 4: What To Do About Cyrus and Shelby?

While IWI tries to bill itself as a story without a main character, Cyrus is ultimately the lead and overall… he’s a kinda shitty guy. Not malicious or bad natured, but with a lot of personality flaws. He’s awkward, stammering, generally bad at expressing his own emotions, and often lies to achieve what he thinks is the best result from a conversation. He is a character with wants, but is not particularly displeased with himself, and is rather comfortable with who he is. He’s not really excited to be in a different body, or outwardly interested in being another dude. However, he is interested in being with other women, or at least their bodies, and repeatedly tries to pair off with them. Specifically when his girlfriend Shelby lands in Nikki’s body.

Despite being together for a decade, Cyrus and his girlfriend Shelby don’t have a good relationship… in really any sense of the word, but particularly when it comes to sex. Shelby is willing to do a lot to get Cyrus going, including putting on a wig to make her look like Nikki, while Cyrus is more content to just masturbate to medium-core porn (gangbang) on his laptop. Reasons for his flagrant disinterest are thrown around… but it boils down to him just being disinterested in her and refusing to be honest with her.

However, Shelby is not strictly innocent either. Despite being very attractive (because she’s played by an actress), she feels inadequate next to her prettier, whiter blonde friend who lives as an influencer. She is envious of fame and beauty and wants to change things. To get out of this rut and free herself of the limitations of being Shelby. She’s someone who wants to get lost in the experience of being someone else, of being someone new, of being desired. So when she gets the opportunity to be Nikki, to live in this limelight, she relishes it. She wants to immerse herself into it for as long as possible… only for Cyrus to just not understand that. 

Cyrus is the sort of boyfriend who is reluctant to agree to something his girlfriend wants and continuously tries to impose his desires as a compromise. Shelby asks him to have sex, but Cyrus says he’s just not in the mood, because he wants to jerk off, not fuck. She wants to have fun. He tries to tell her to be cautious. She wants to lose herself in a body swapping adventure. He insists that she stay near him. And when Shelby imposes, when she tries to throw the two into some body swapped make out funsies, Cyrus just cannot do it. The two are just bad at agreeing on their goals and communicating their wants, to the point where it is hard to see what really brings them together.

…Which then leads to the scene where Cyrus tries and fails to confront Dennis. A scene that’s just a nexus of bad decisions as Cyrus goes about handling this delicate situation in the worst way he can. He’s hotheaded, aggressive, does not treat Dennis with compassion, humility, or a careful tongue. Dennis has every reason to be an asshole, Cyrus doesn’t, and they both stoop to the same low. It is the impetus of the conflict that defines the final fourth of the film, and really just goes to make Cyrus into this immature asshat who, despite pushing 30, is still emotionally 15.

It is because of Cyrus’s bumbling confrontation that Dennis reveals the truth. That Cyrus was never fully ‘in love’ with Shelby as she was led on to believe that she was actually just his second pick. He’s always wanted Nikki, and he’s never really been able to get over that. It’s an accusation that Cyrus cannot fathom a defense against, and one that leaves Shelby feeling betrayed. He tries to skirt around this, and Shelby does give him two more chances, but both end in failure. First, he’s caught in a lie and then he fails a test to see if he wants Shelby as herself, or Shelby in Nikki’s body.

Watching it unfold honestly feels like someone consistently making the wrong decisions in a narrative adventure game, or a visual novel, as if they are trying to go for the bad end. It naturally makes Cyrus out to be a shitty guy but, again, Shelby is not great either. She is absolutely willing to steal Nikki’s body and prepare to sabotage Nikki’s reputation to get what she wants. Hell, she even exploits Nikki’s allergic reaction to get her way. She demands that complex issues be handled immediately even when under a time crunch and pressure, which is how you get disingenuous responses.

They are both flawed people whose faults are exposed as they are divorced from the normal, and it leads their relationship to crumble down in their ending. Which… is the one part of their story I take umbrage with. 

It’s What Inside ends with Cyrus and Shelby as the only two back in their own bodies, and Cyrus on the path to prison after Dennis in Cyrus made a bogus confession to the cops. Shelby visits him, but when he asks her to help him, she declines, choosing instead to break off their relationship then and there, telling him to fuck off. She has seen his true colors, seen him from a different perspective, and no longer wants to waste her life on someone like him. 

From Shelby’s perspective, this is a fine conclusion. She did not get what she wanted— Nikki’s body— but she managed to grow as a person from these new experiences and perspectives and is ready to improve her life. Yet for Cyrus… this is a bit much. Yes, I would not call Cyrus a good person. He is a chronic liar and kinda a dipshit, but is he ’25 to life’ levels of bad? No! He’s not even 25 to Life (2006) levels of bad.

Furthermore, something about this ending just does not feel right for this type of story. Yes, they learned something and are moving on from their dysfunctional relationship. But why this way and in a way that does not involve a body swap? Everybody else is stranded in a different body and needs to get on with their new lives, but Shelby makes out with her everything intact, and Cyrus arguably has it the worst… third worst.

This works, but it lacks a certain through line. This is the one part of the ending that does not take advantage of this being a body swap story. If I was in charge of the ending… I’d push for three different endings for variety’s sake, because that makes the story richer, and using the power of streaming, you could randomize which one someone gets. Kinda like Clue(1985)! …But there was definitely not enough budget for that. 

Instead, I would have Cyrus and Shelby swap bodies. The two get Cyrus’s body out of trouble, get ready to leave, but with Cyrus complaining about how he’s a girl now, Shelby in Cyrus would get in the car and lock the door. She would explain that after dealing with Cyrus for a decade and losing her body to him, she’s done. She does not want to spend the rest of her life with Cyrus and wants to be her own person. 

Cyrus would object, panic, saying that she needs his help to live his life, that he needs her help. Only for Shelby to say that she knows everything there is to know about Cyrus, and now that she’s stuck like this, she’s going to be a better Cyrus (high bar, I know). Then, as Shelby drives away, Cyrus would be left in Shelby’s body, with no real idea how to live as a woman and confronted with how little he actually knows about her life. Shelby is free and full of anger, while Cyrus loses his support and is left to either reinvent himself or suffer. Cut to credits.

Sure, that screws over Shelby… but everybody else but Beatrice got screwed over. She might have had her reasons for how she acted during the climax, but she was still acting like a bastard and threatening to steal someone’s body. She was deliberately trying to fuck with Cyrus and chooses the path of vengeful rage rather than a more pragmatic and sensible approach. She’s shown her true colors… and it feels wrong that she walks away as the ‘victor.’

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Part 5: Painted in Dark Colors

While I have made it clear that I like It’s What’s Inside as a story, I have some less than favorable thoughts on some of its presensational choices. Particularly how it uses its setting and its eccentric approach to lighting.

The setting of the mansion, one filled with walk-in art pieces and avant garde designs, is a great choice. The expansiveness of a mansion lets characters pair off while keeping private. The sculptures, unique rooms, and psychedelic lighting all add to the unnerving and otherworldly sense of being in a different body. The circular room with a wall full of small fragmented mirrors is both simple but also deeply perfect for a story like this. I like it as a setting… but I routinely couldn’t see it because of how dim and exaggerated the lighting is.

At the start of the film, the mansion is dark. Not because it is an old house without lighting. There are lighting fixtures in nearly every room, they’re just set to dim. This makes it hard to see and comprehend the physical details of the characters, let alone the fine details of this meticulously designed mansion. The poor lighting combined with a lack of focus on the backgrounds turns the mansion into a more nebulous place. One where I can recognize a few rooms, but have no idea how they connected or which ones haven’t been missing. This is not inherently a bad thing, but it diminishes the importance of the setting.

This sense of uneasiness and vagueness with the setting is only made worse by how certain areas are cast in colored lighting. Basic film theory says that if this is being done, it should be for a reason. Each color should signify something in the language of the film and be significant. In practice though, the coloring tends to be mostly location based.

Aggressive blue lighting is so associated with the outside I thought it was just a way of representing rural moonlight. The garden area, greenhouse, and a side room are all basked in oppressive green, but not for a clear reason. There is one room that I think is only used for Cyrus and Shelby to have one conversation, which is covered in purple. While the front exterior and only way out is awash in a rainbow of cool colors. What does this mean? How does it enhance the visual language? And what do lights that shift between colors indicate? That’s all beyond me.

However, I will say that there are three instances where this deliberate and exaggerated approach to coloring works well. I know I just mentioned the mirror room, but it serves as a regular hub where people meet to discuss harsh truths or shatter relationships. In a room covered in mirrors that, while reflective, only show smaller fragments of a person , reflected as uneven angles. This is all paired with a dim violet light, likely meant to symbolize ultraviolet light and its ability to uncover truths to the naked eye. It is a closed room at the end of a hallway covered in blue light and is meant to symbolize the end of a spectrum of what can normally be seen— of visible light. It doesn’t just look cool, it has some symbolic teeth.

Occasionally, the film will suppress the greens and blues in order to only leave behind an image of red and black, where characters are depicted as their ‘souls’ irrespective of their bodies. This is foreshadowed with an art project by one of the characters before the body swapping, and I think it looks great. It’s harsh, it’s abrasive, it feels like it is soaked in infrared lighting or set within a dark room— where photos are developed and the truth is developed. It’s lighting with a clear purpose that the film uses to great effect. To show what’s inside.

Then there are the flashback scenes, which are told via a series of animated sepia tone photographs paired with conversational narration. Still images that are rapidly flickered between, giving the impression of rapid movement. I love everything about these sequences. The way characters flicker between frames, the way that elements of these photos pop into perspective, the fact that certain movements do have in-between frames. And for a film that puts so much emphasis on color, making the white black and white works incredibly well as a visual shorthand. The life they are living is full of color, but as the present fades into the past, so too do the colors and emotions, as they are reduced to crystalized polaroids, memories of singular moments.

Clearly, the people working on this film highly valued the way that color could be used to enhance scenes. How it can highlight the harsh truths, represent the past, and give unique locations a more symbolic and pronounced visual identity. Yet rather than use this tool sparingly, they use it constantly, and it just gets tiresome after a while. It got to the point where the dull gray-tinted outdoor overcast scenes at the ending looked refreshing after seeing such a barrage of party colors.

…Also, and I did not have a better place to add this, but I have to say I just LOVE the body swap machine in this movie. It’s not something arcane. It’s not some wackadoo sci-fi doodad or peculiar pods. It’s not a goldarn app or alien remote. It looks like something a bunch of university students would assemble in a lab using whatever resources they have available. The many AUX-like ports in it make it almost look like a piece of audio equipment. Its various switches and buttons are arranged in a way where they look like they have a purpose without being excessive. 

The lights beaming from its sides give it a dramatic flair, but mostly because it’s in a suitcase. While the fact that people use the device by applying basic electrodes to their brain feels… both mundane yet novel. I’ve had enough electrodes strapped to me to know that they do not transfer signals to your brain. Yet it circles back into this ‘homemade body swap machine’ angle. It’s a repurpose of existing and established technology, but with a new twist.

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Part 6: C.O.D.A. – Concluding Opinion – Deserving Acclaim

While I have some misgivings and things that I would have liked to see play out differently, I still greatly enjoyed It’s What’s Inside and am grateful for the fact it exists. The body swap is a genre rife for exploration, but in order to grow the genre, there needs to be more experimentation in mainstream works. And while IWI isn’t the biggest thing around… it’s rare to see something with this kind of platform that understands the narrative applications of a body swap. The horror, the thrill, the messy way the reality of death plays into it, the ways it can devastate people’s lives, how it can exacerbate existing issues in relationships. None of these are new ideas, but I was consistently impressed by the execution..

As a creator, I found the film to be inspiring, full of small flakes of brilliance and great ideas that are well worth adopting or expanding. However, more than anything, I hope that other creators look and let it inspire them and their work so they can take these ideas and put their own spin on them. …While infusing it with a bit more TSF. Because while I can respect a body swap movie for wanting to avoid that, mostly sticking to MtM and FtF, I also know what I like.

Like I said at the top, if you are a body swap fan, you owe it to yourself to check out It’s What’s Inside. It is the rare body swap movie that truly gets the genre.