With Halloween fast approaching, it’s common for the top streaming services to release trailers for new spooky seasonal titles. I’m personally always on the lookout for new horror movies to help me ease into the colder, darker months. So when I saw the trailer for the new Netflix movie It’s what’s inside that counts, I immediately thought this would be the perfect watch for next month.
After a successful premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January, Greg Jardin’s trippy thriller has been given an October 4 release date on Netflix. The film will be shown at the upcoming Netflix Geeked Week, the streamers’ version of Comic-Con.
But despite the trailer’s disturbing snippets of a tech-induced mind trip that allows characters to swap bodies (which you can watch below), Jardin’s thriller defies the boundaries of horror by blending elements of multiple genres. He described the film in a interview with Netflix as “a science fiction thriller with jokes”.
In addition to his comments on the film’s genre, Jardin described the film as what we might expect to be a thriller with an underlying commentary on authenticity and online lifestyles. Speaking to Oscar winner Colman Domingo, who produced the film with his husband Raúl Domingo, Jardin revealed that the film is “essentially a top-tier sci-fi concept of body-swapping, which allows us to explore the artificial intimacy that’s presented online in different forms – social media being one of them.”
The trailer, which features a group of teenagers playing a body-swapping game, resembles the 2022 horror film. Bodies Bodies Bodies, which revolves around a group of friends who play a murder-in-the-dark style party game – which also results in a chaotic bloodbath. So, if the darkly comedic elements of It’s what’s inside that counts fit the unhinged humor of Bodies Bodies Bodiesone of the best Netflix movies, might just be my most anticipated movie of the scary season.
What can you expect from the plot of It’s What’s Inside?
Speaking with Domingo, Jardin breaks down the plot into three major storylines: “A group of friends at a party, a guy brings a suitcase, it gets crazy.” Set during the events of a pre-wedding party, a group of friends gather at a large estate to kick off the festivities — each of whom represents a different archetype, including influencer Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey), artist Brooke (Reina Hardesty), stereotypical trust-fund kid Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood) and groom Reuben (Devon Terrell).
But it’s the mysterious Forbes (David Thompson) who shakes up the night’s events, arriving at the party with a mysterious suitcase. Opening the suitcase, he reveals a lie detector-like mechanism that allows people to swap bodies using electrodes, and when he convinces the guests to play along, the night unfolds in a mind-bending twist of events.