It's What's Inside (2024)

Rated R for a lot of sexual references, including clothed on-screen sexuality.  There's also a ton of drug use and drug use. There is death, but more of the issue is how people react to death as opposed to outright murder.  But there is some violence in here as well.  Along with language.  Along with adultery. Really, this movie has a lot.

DIRECTOR: Greg Jardin

There's so much writing today.  I wrote too much for the book today and now I'm trying to get this blog done.  Also, the weird part of it all is that this is my inaugural entry for 2024's spooky season, when really it's more horror adjacent.  That's okay.  I'm not looking for over-the-top gore in my spooky season, even though that's for sure happening soon.  Anyway, I had to throw this movie at the top. io9 did a whole article on it and how genius it was, so I had to check it out for myself.

They're right.  It's pretty brilliant.  Maybe I was a bit more forgiving because I'm often taken by a twist.  This is one of those movies that really caught me off-guard.  Part of the reason it might have worked on me so well is that I stayed away from anything informative going into it.  I just knew that, aesthetically, it looked like it could get creepy.  I mean, I wasn't wrong.  It's more of an upsetting movie than it is a straight up horror movie.  It's a commentary on how people are absolutely terrible and it takes very little for inhibitions to get wiped away.

The odd epiphany I had with It's What's Inside is what horror movies (again, bear with me) comment about teenagers generationally.  It's not a surprise that horror tends to appeal more to teenage audiences than other demographics.  There's something rebellious and new about being able to see horror. Horror for children stays away from tropes introduced in R-rated (and, now, intense PG-13 movies), which leads to these films having teenage protagonists.  Now, once again, we're dealing with semi-teenage protagonists.  The narrative technically starts in high school or college and these characters are in their early 20s.  I'm in my 40s, so I hate to say that I treat 20-somethings like children.  I'm a bad person and I'm working through my personality defects.  But let's treat these characters like teenage representatives.  I was thinking about slasher movies in the '70s and '80s.  There are characters who are unlikable, who tend to be cannon fodder for the killer.  But for the most part, there's a handful of characters who we are meant to like.  We lose some of these, but our final character (tends to be a final girl) is the paragon of virtue.  The '90s and 2000s had characters a little more callous towards death.  They host parties in spite of a problem happening around them.  But ultimately, most of them are loyal to, once again, the paragon of virtue.  

But since watching Bodies Bodies Bodies and It's What's Inside (which would make an amazing double-feature), Gen Z might be the natural evolution of the awful teenager.  I feel incredibly old complaining about "kids these days".  But Gen Z horror (and horror adjacent!) doesn't mind making the protagonists completely insufferable.  Now, part of me believes that it is because, as storytellers, we've become far more comfortable with making our protagonists --regardless of age --as morally complex to the point of being straight up evil.  I'm a guy who loves Breaking Bad.  But the characters in It's What's Inside are, top to bottom, all terrible people.  Now, part of that comes from the central conceit of the movie.  Everyone, no matter how morally grounded they seem, are awful people given the opportunity to take advantage of it.  There are a handful of moments that have whiplash like moments where morality is thrown out the window.  Sure, it's in the face of trauma.  (Hey, I get why the word "Trauma" is right beneath the balcony now!) 

The second that these characters get a pass to be their worst selves --especially culminating in the death of the two on the balcony --they instantly do horrible things.  Dennis (I think he's inside Cyrus's body) instantly frames Cyrus for murder. Admittedly, it's an odd choice considering that Dennis wants to stay inside of Cyrus's body.  But even Shelby is willing to completely destroy Nikki as a form of blackmail over someone that she not only calls a friend, but also partially idolizes.   Shelby, for the bulk of the movie, is the one that has our sympathies.  But Jardin does something really smart.  The movie demands concentration.  No one knows who is who, so there's moments where you have to actively be thinking about character motivations.  Yet, Shelby does some things that make us sympathize with Cyrus.  Listen, you're supposed to hate Shelby and Cyrus.  That's the point of the movie. But when Shelby goes dark with her motivations, she becomes a straight-up villain.

It's funny how both Bodies Bodies Bodies and It's What's Inside are about rich Gen Zers (Zoomers?) at a really swanky house, spending God foresaken amounts of money before something goes horribly wrong.  Both movies are stories of circumstance.  But I wonder if Gen Z is starting to return to the narrative of economic prosperity.  It's weird.  The story I've been hearing my entire life is the story of how nothing is affordable.  Yet, every single person at that table enjoys a moderate amount of financial and social success.  It's a story of jealousy among the upper crust.  I hate that I watched Metropolitan right before this because I keep seeing rich people having rich people problems. But I am thinking that if the previous generations commented on specific vices, like premarital sex and drugs, I wonder if the bigger commentary in these rich Gen Z movies is about empathy.  

These characters have sex and do drugs.  We haven't shifted off of those moral norms as reasons to kill of characters yet.  But it seems like the drugs and sex is almost an afterthought to the fact that these characters don't really care about anyone else.  In the same way that elder Millennials have a hard time relating to younger Millennials, I wonder if elder Zoomers have a hard time relating to younger Zoomers.  The elder Zoomers that I taught were incredibly imbued with empathy while the younger ones tend to look out for number one.  That's the movie that I feel like I'm watching.  It's odd, and mainly it comes from the fact that I'm seeing someone else's face attached to the wrong character, but I don't even feel bad for Forbes at he end of the movie. We have the joy of everyone's life being destroyed.  Lord knows I rooted for the big bad behind everything when the movie ended and I adored it.  But it's because everyone is really unlikable.

But even all of this generational analysis aside, the movie works. The movie works like crazy.  Greg Jardin has such a sense of style coupled with a really clever take on the body switch story.  Yeah, it's not outright scary.  But it is fascinating and the proper amount of brain breaky.  It's a fantastic good time.