“What the fuck is going on?”

Story: A group of friends get together the weekend before one of them is going to get married. They haven’t seen each other in eight years, but things seem to start up exactly where they left off…including a bunch of resentment, crushes, and the like. But when an estranged friend shows up with a high-tech game that feels like a much deeper form of Werewolf, things really start to crumble. Literally and figuratively.

Scares: None.
Splat Factor: Dead bodies impaled on iron fence spikes.

Subgenre:
Year Released: 2024
Remake, Sequel or OG (Original Ghoul)?: Original. And pointless.

Trick or Treat?: What if The Big Chill was filled with characters that are unlikeable jerks? Or, how about if Bodies Bodies Bodies was full of characters you didn’t care about? Welcome to Inside, where you get both. I’m gonna say what I say about Borat: I understand what they tried to do here. I get it, really I do. I just don’t think it’s any good.

I kept getting the title of this movie confused with the vastly more interesting It Lives Inside. Maybe that was just my brain hoping I’d change the channel. No such luck, brain. We’re in this now. Woo. The first two minutes of Inside had me wondering if I’d accidentally clicked on the wrong movie. (I hadn’t. I checked.) The next four minutes treated me to two people who obviously have no good reason to be together; the scene shows that neither one of them know anything about the other, nor do they seem to even like each other. How promising. Then it’s a smash cut to a neon title card.

And oh wow does writer/director Greg Jardin wants to be Tarantino so desperately. This film rips off pays homage to so much of Tarantino’s style, but those stylistic points are so poorly used you definitely won’t be wondering of Jardin is a pseudonym. There’s split screens, camera rotations, and a music score that’s so quirky it feels desperate. Instead of feeling light and fun, it feels pretentious and grasping. The use of vivid colors harks back to Argento’s Susperia, and that gives the film a look that both fresh and retro. See? I can say something nice here.

The cast tries their best to inject some sort of emotional resonance into their characters, but they’re given so little to work with it’s impossible. There’s no way to tell who’s who based on mannerisms or speech patterns beyond one character’s overuse of “bro”. And that tip-off is called out so loudly, I could almost hear the sound of Jardin patting himself on the back. Hey, he showed that characters are different! Don’t get used to it, it won’t happen again. The use of red lights to show the real face of the person in someone else’s body is a nice idea, but again, the actors emote exactly the same way no matter who’s who, so after a while it’s just a bunch of mouths flapping, and I wanted so desperately for the film to get to the point. Surprise, there isn’t one. Except for the ending that leaves things open for a sequel.

I’d figured out the surprise moment at the end took twenty minutes in. I’m not saying that because of my big brain; y’all know that’s not the deal. It’s that that plot point was brought up early on, and immediately dropped… So yeah, obviously it’s gonna come back around. There are very interesting ideas in Inside, like what it’d be like to literally be in someone else’s shoes. Or, what’s the moral responsibility of being in someone else’s body? Neither idea is given anything beyond a vague whiff of thought in this muddled plot.

Maybe if I cared enough about these characters to actually try to focus on who’s who, this could have been fun. But I didn’t, so it wasn’t.

Score: 1 out of 5 pumpkins.