Returning to this website is like coming back home after being abroad for several years and finding mountains of raccoon shit and countless hobo skeletons piled up in my living room, all while the air of willful death asserts its own kind of vile consciousness upon the sick simulacrum of my mind, the tangible and the ghostly roped together in the horrible marrow of inchoate screams. Just like I left it.

Intro

We don’t talk enough about how fine it is to be fine. It’s fine. Who wants to be impactful, or even vaguely remembered, mere moments after they’ve finished talking? I like it when long-standing acquaintances struggle to recall my name, profession, or why we’re currently in the same room. Fuck, my boss thinks I’m still a teenager even though I’m both older than gravity and have aged so poorly that I somehow look like both the husband and the wife from American Gothic. But this is good (not the aging into wrinkled androgyny thing – that is weird). Obscurity is good. Less pressure that way.

And movies can take this chill-out-and-await-the-Reaper-for-his-icy-grasp-cannot-be-outrun-anyway approach to life, too! You don’t have to redefine the genre to qualify as a pleasant experience. The social commentary in District 9 boils down to “apartheid was bad” and Bodies, Bodies, Bodies offers up as its grand generational observation “young people and their phones, am I right?”. And those are just the forgettable movies that I can remember! Imagine all of the forgettable ones I’ve forgotten.

So let’s not expect Rashomon from our Netflix silly-slasher. It’s What’s Inside is good specifically because it is fine, which is fine.

Let Us Discuss the Technical Aspects of This Film First

The absolute fine-ness of this movie can best be seen in the filmmaking fundamentals on display. They’re great! A movie like this, with a deliberately confusing plot and tonal shifts galore, requires a tight visual style to keep the audience rolling along with each new development. Viewers have to be engaged without being pandered to, challenged without being frustrated, all while not explicitly realizing that these things are happening. And that’s exactly what we get! Lighting changes highlight personality shifts, lingering shots of consistent or contradictory character traits keep hinting at yet another false identity to uncover – and all of this is done visually, as it should be in a movie. Nobody explains in tremendous, excruciating detail what has happened so far, because the filmmakers trust in their ability to tell the story both technically and emotionally through the tenants of a visual medium. There are plenty of movies that reach for the thematic stars without remembering this necessary shit!

The Characters Are Also Fine

I placed my technical appraisal of this movie ahead of the segment on characters for a reason. And even then we’re only going to mention the characters insofar as they provide lubrication to various plot and thematic considerations. And that’s fine! A movie like this almost always needs to make a call between broad commentary or emotional character journey, and instead of greedily attempting to drive in both lanes It’s What’s Inside actually commits to something: mockery of aging millennials in particular and self-destructfully wistful adults in general. That’s the call the filmmakers made, and God bless them for making it, because it allows us as viewers to carry certain expectations going in, and, accordingly, grade the movie in the appropriate context. Limiting scope is a good thing! Tell one story right, not a half-dozen poorly.

I Will Now Pre-Empt Outside Meanness With Meanness of My Own

It has been suggested by various observers who are actually me providing convenient arguments on which to dunk that the final twist of this movie is too easily guessed given its central plot device. No shit! Of course it’s easy to guess! Of course the body-swapping movie has a final twist that involves the swapping of bodies! It would be weirder if it didn’t! Do you get mad at a restaurant when you order a steak-bomb and they promptly bring you a sandwich with so much shredded meat on it that it almost appears as if some sort of explosive device has gone off? Are you proud of yourself for finding it narratively suspicious that our film begins with its primary players sitting around and musing aloud statements such as “I wonder if we’ll ever find out what happened to that HITHERTO UNACCOUNTED FOR MEMBER OF OUR GROUP, the one who would be justified in holding a grudge against the rest of us and WHO HAS ACCESS TO A MACHINE THAT ALLOWS THE TRANSFER OF CONSCIOUSNESS FROM ONE HUMAN TO ANOTHER.”

Well, this does not bother me in the least! And I will explain why:

Eat my ass.

No, wait, I actually have an explanation:

With cinnamon. Eat my ass with cinnamon.

OK, here we go for real:

And a banana, to make it a balanced breakfast. Eat my ass with cinnamon and a banana. Make sure you get up and move around a little bit afterwards to help with digestion, because that is a heavy meal.

Bah, humbug, fine:

It’s how the story is told, not the story itself, that matters! As is the case with every story ever told the true charm is in the details! It’s about the use of colors to differentiate characters, the evolution of those characters’ dynamics given the perverse mixture of freedom and obligation they’ve all been granted as a consequence of inhabiting someone else’s body! Lord of the Rings is going to end with a smelly weirdo throwing some ancient bling into a volcano! It’s about how he gets there that matters, and how many slashfics he inspires along the way!

The End

I like it when a movie is comfortable enough in its own skin (get it? I’m the worst!) that it just presents itself to the audience with no expectation of changing the way they think about film in general, or storytelling as a concept. It’s like when I can’t think of a good mic drop to end an article on so I just stop writing.