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★★★★
Directed by: #HeatherFink
Written by: Heather Fink
Starring: Heather Fink, #MarshallStratton
Freaky Friday meets The Five Year Engagement on Viagra, indie #filmmaker Heather Fink’s unabashed movie Inside You takes the body swap concept and slaps a brazen attitude on it. Full of gender role exploration and relationship quandaries, it’s an indie comedy with as much heart as horniness.
Heather Fink and Marshall Stratton play Stephanie and Ryan respectively (and also irrespectively), a couple enduring the pains of their five-year-itch. Whilst one person wants to avoid getting married and have a lot of sex, the other wants to settle down and get married. And I know what you are thinking, but in this case, roles are reversed before they get reversed (again): it’s Stephanie who intially wants to have lots of sex, whilst Ryan is pushing for the nuptials, a refreshing display of balance to gender portrayals. The former, hoping to ignite their sex life by dousing it with oil, hops into a mysterious sex shop full of voodoo weird shit and an accordion-playing child who is almost definitely Satan, whereby she purchases something which enables a body swap after coitous. From there, our struggling couple must now survive familiar yet unfamiliar body parts, personal secrets, and newfound ways of urinating.
To cope with such a challenging premise such as the body swap, you need two performers who can rise to the occasion of portraying characters on multiple levels without the audience struggling to stay convinced. With Fink and Stratton, the performances stay brilliantly funny throughout and dedicated to the bit. Their chemistry, irrespective of who they are playing at the time, is always believable, charming, and just the right amount of cheeky crudeness. Whilst the plot does tackle some heavy themes, such as adultery and harassment, it is always done through the frame of #comedy, keeping the piece light throughout.
The production is slick and much like her character, Fink takes a few risks in order to keep Inside You from feeling boring. We don’t get all the guts and glory but the movie is not far off from feeling like soft porn at times, as the performers get themselves into all kinds of erotic catastrophes. The mise en scéne feels at home with other raunchy comedies like American Pie, Road Trip, and Van Wilder.
There is a breakneck pace to the movie which sees the narrative get a little tangled with too many threads, and there are a few unnecessary side characters who get a little too much screen time, but aside from that this is a welcome addition to the likes of Big, Change Up, and 17 Again in the body swap genre. Especially for audiences who like their Fridays extra effing Freaky.
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