It’s What’s Inside feels like it could be a Black Mirror episode with a couple of additional tweaks here or there (which is fairly high praise coming from me).
The basic set up is a group of college friends getting together for a prewedding night to celebrate the impending nuptuals. In the process of reconnecting, the audience is shown how some of them have lived in the meantime. A couple of them are in a relationship (that appears to be struggling), you have the social media influencer, the rich kid, a couple of new age women, and the nerdy guy who none of them have kept up with since college. However, since they made the pact (about getting together before the wedding), he still shows up and has the MacGuffin which the whole movie is based on. See, Forbes (the nerd) has a device which will allow a person to switch bodies with another person.
What the movie does really well is explore the age old idea of what it would be like to walk in someone else’s shoes. What sort of freedom might you have if no one knew who was driving the body you were in? Would you lose some of the inhibitions? Would you lose a part of yourself?
While I would agree that who we are is based on our memories, our thoughts, our history, whatever you want to call it… I don’t believe that it exists outside of the idea that our bodies directly affect who we are as well. I’d argue that these meat shells we all wear reflect our thoughts and vice versa. If you have a more attractive body/face/etc, then you may have a bit more confidence when going through your life. And less if you are less attractive (or perhaps preceive yourself as less attractive).
Image by Kohji Asakawa from Pixabay
But being able to wear a second skin, even for a short time… we see the characters (or some of them) really get into their roles.
I didn’t mention it, but they are playing a game where you aren’t supposed to tell anyone and whoever is the last one to get found out “wins”.
This mostly means there is no reason to not do some level of roleplaying. And I think the actors all do a pretty good job of “playing” their new roles, but the movie does a clever bit of storytelling where they will show the scene in reds/blues/& greens to show us who is inside the person. So even if you got a little confused about who is who, this snaps things right into place.
I don’t want to go into spoilers, but you can likely guess that things don’t go smoothly as the night progresses, and it is those moments there are some interesting choices and some things that didn’t allways make a ton of sense. It’s not bad decisions, but sometimes it had me wondering if a person would really react to the situation in that way or not.
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Regardless, it has enough twists and turns that make it worth giving it a watch this Halloween season.
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John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.
He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!
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His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.
He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com
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