‘It’s What’s Inside’ and The Unstressed Detail
A fun sci-fi romp doesn’t hide its twist very well.
NEW STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This newsletter aggressively spoils things.
It’s always true that if you want an interesting treatment of a trope, you have to dig into genre—and mid- to low-budget genre at that1. Take the body-swap trope, where two or more people switch bodies and have existential hijinx2 as a result—the bigger the budget, the more likely you’re watching a comedy about a kid and a parent who swap lives for a day or two, with much hilarity to follow3. The lower the budget, the more likely you’ll get something like It’s What’s Inside (budget: $2.5 million), which dropped on Netflix recently4.
The basic premise: Several college friends gather for a celebration before their friend Reuben’s (Devon Terrell) wedding. Reuben has also invited Forbes (David W. Thompson), who the group hasn’t seen since a scandal involving alcohol and his under-age sister, Beatrice (Madison Davenport), forced him to drop out of school. There’s bad blood, but Forbes insists that it’s all water under the bridge5, especially because he’s now a successful tech-bro type who’s brought his big product with him: A suitcase-sized device that allows people to switch bodies. He suggests they play a party game: They will randomly switch bodies and try to guess who is in what body based solely on their behavior6.
Of course, things go sideways. Everyone has a secret or a secret agenda (mostly focused on Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey), the hot blonde influencer type everyone hates, wants to be, or wants to screw, or all three at once7) and those fractures tear the group apart. The specifics don’t matter for this essay, necessarily, all that matters is that you now have all the information you need to deduce the story’s big twist. I dropped it just like the film did—quickly and without fanfare—and just like the film I tried to ignore it so energetically so you don’t notice it that it glows with a sort of anti-radiation8.
See That? That’s My Body
The twist, obviously, is that Forbes isn’t Forbes at all: The body of Forbes is occupied by his sister Beatrice from the very beginning. If you didn’t see that coming, you must not watch or read a lot of stories9.
The ole’ Unstressed Detail trick is often difficult to pull off. For a twist like this to work, you have to play fair with the audience and let them know that a) Beatrice exists and b) she has some motive for revenge. Otherwise the reveal won’t slap, because it would seem too out of left field. On the other hand, if you keep reminding the audience about Beatrice and her connection to the plot, everyone will guess what’s coming and your twist won’t have much impact10.
So: The Unstressed Detail. You put the info out there, but you do it fast, and you refer back to it only as often as absolutely necessary, all in the hope that your audience forgets about it, but then can’t be mad when you remind them because you did play fair11. This can be really difficult to calibrate—every single time Beatrice comes up might be the moment your audience thinks oh ho! that’s an awful lot of Beatrice referencing, a bit suspicious, innit? But not enough and people are accusing you of pulling a twist out of your ass, or (worse) being a bad writer12.
I Want to Play Games
A non-comedic Body Switch story like this has a lot in common with mysteries: The clues have to be there but they can’t be too obvious, so there are also red herrings and misdirection. Unstressing a detail usually involves making a lot of other noise—if you deluge the audience with information, it’s easy to slip things in unnoticed. Writer-director Greg Jardin also dresses up the moment where he unstresses Beatrice with some fun visuals in a sequence that recounts the party where Forbes got into trouble using a series of black and white still images13. The sequence keeps Beatrice in the background, implying she’s a minor detail—that the real focus is Forbes, who was unjustly forced to drop out of school and thus might want revenge against his former friends.
None of this is badly handled in It’s What’s Inside; unstressing details in order to hide them in plain sight is difficult and no matter how well done some asshole with a Substack might make a mental leap and guess your twist14. And guessing that Forbes is actually Beatrice from the jump actually doesn’t harm the story—the motivation remains the same, after all, and in the end the reveal is just a nice little twist at the end. If it had been Forbes all along you wouldn’t feel like anything was missing here.
Of course, the weirdest part of the whole story is how these crazy kids lean into switching bodies so quickly. While I can totally believe that a bunch of young, drunk idiots would immediately use a cutting-edge and mind-blowing technology like that for a party game, I think the lack of reaction (aside from a 5-second burst of screaming the first time it’s used as everyone freaks out) undercuts the story’s effectiveness. Finding yourself in someone else’s body would have to lead to a long list of weird experiences: Discovering they have digestive issues, realizing what your own body smells like to other people15, experiencing perfect eyesight for the first time in your life—that shit should mess with a person16. The way all the characters here immediately start giggling and acting like being in their friend’s body is just hijinx doesn’t really ring true.
If I ever had the opportunity to switch bodies with someone, the only reason I would do it would be for the embezzlement opportunities. Give me 20 minutes in Warren Buffet’s body and I could do some real damage.
NEXT WEEK: Caddo Lake is no Primer
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It’s well known that I have zero taste, and will eagerly watch a 90-minute horror movie made for $5,000 and then write 1,000 words about it like it’s War and Peace.
Easily the best kind of hijinx.
If I swapped bodies with my father when I was 17 I would have spent the day crying. Man was not in good shape.
And is now basically forgotten. Great going Jeff! You have mastered the art of capturing the zeitgeist. Where’s my Pulitzer?
This is undermined by Thomson’s naturally slippery physicality; he’s the sort of actor you just assume is lying to you.
I may be the only person in the world who hates party games. I came here to get shitfaced and desecrate your bathroom, not study a bunch of rules and then lose a game.
Despite being portrayed by Debnam-Carey as an almost literal blank slate, all vacant stares and slackjawed moping.
Much like my overworked liver, which keeps us awake at night with its gentle glow.
Or, like me, you have a tendency to watch a lot of movies after drinking a fifth of Jack Daniels and eating several burritos so that you’re panting on the couch like a pufferfish and don’t have the strength to find the remote control.
Unpopular opinion: Twists are overrated, as are spoilers. Every bit of your story should stand up to multiple viewings or readings. If it’s not as good the second time around because you know the twists, it wasn’t all that great to begin with.
Similar to how I ruin every social occasion I attend but then blame the hosts because they know who I am yet they still invited me.
You can call me a lot of names and I will yawn, but calling me a bad writer is fighting words.
Most of my college memories are SCENE MISSING stills. Good times. One assumes.
It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me.
There’s a whole horror novel in that one sentence fragment, isn’t there?
If anyone ever inhabits my body, I apologize in advance for sooooo many things.