‘It’s What’s Inside’ Review: Roleplay Games Spiral Out of Control In an Increasingly Hysterical Horror Comedy
21.01.2024 - 15:57
/ variety.com
Guy Lodge Film Critic Adding to cinema’s long list of hellish bachelor parties to which nobody in their right mind should accept an invitation, “It’s What’s Inside” gathers a large crowd of mostly estranged friends in a remote mansion where either no one can hear you scream, or no one much cares if they do. It’s an age-old setup for a body-countdown horror movie, and it’s to the credit of Greg Jardin‘s highly strung, busily plotted debut feature that it doesn’t unfold exactly as you’d expect.
That’s down to a nifty high-concept premise — not wholly original, but more commonly used for purposes of comedy than horror — that the filmmakers are eager to keep a secret, which might be a challenge if this grabby, nasty Sundance Midnight premiere gathers the “Talk to Me”-level buzz it’s clearly targeting. It begins, somewhat tellingly, with a failed exercise in roleplay.
We open on Shelby (Brittany O’Grady), a cautious young woman, donning a wig and a vampish new persona in an attempt to get her her detached boyfriend Cyrus (James Morosini) to look at her differently — or, really, to look at her at all. Catching him instead mid-masturbation over laptop porn, she abandons the disguise, and they agree to defer a larger discussion about their sex life until later, after the weekend wedding celebrations of their friend Reuben (Devon Terrell).
It’s not the first time in “It’s What’s Inside” that relationship fault lines will be exposed when characters casually adopt new identities, all in the interests of spicing things up; the film snuffles out the truths that emerge when everyone is masked, to steadily more hysterical effect. Before the wedding comes a stag night of sorts, though with entertainment markedly different from the
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