Sex scenes in Netflix’s It’s What’s Inside pose questions about sexual consent during body-swapping

By Abby Amoakuh

Published Oct 8, 2024 at 01:00 PM

Reading time: 3 minutes

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Image courtesy of IMDb

Body-swapping certainly isn’t a novel concept in horror and science fiction films. Remember Freaky Friday, It’s a Boy Girl Thing, and 13 Going on 30? This cinematic tool allows storytellers to explore the unique trauma, gender dynamics, and social background attached to different forms of embodiment. If you fuse these tensions with social media anxiety and drunk shenanigans at a pre-wedding party, you basically have the premise of Netflix’s newest hit, It’s What’s Inside.

The refreshing science fiction horror comedy breathes new life into the genre by delivering a 21st-century take on body-swapping. However, it also skims past questions about consent and bodily autonomy throughout the night of chaos and debauchery it captures…

First things first, the story follows the college friend group of Shelby, Cyrus, Reuben, Dennis, Nikki, Brooke and Maya as they gather at Reuben’s family home the night before his wedding. After a couple of hours, the friends are also joined by latecomer Forbes, who hasn’t been seen since an explosive party at college for which he got expelled for bringing his high school student sister Beatrice. She suffered an episode during the infamous event and was subsequently sent to a mental health facility (also a classic horror movie device).

Forbes comes bearing an extra special gift encased in an old suitcase: a device that allows them to swap bodies with one another. He proposes a game where they first swap and then have to guess who is in the other person’s body based on the real person’s unique behaviour and mannerisms.

As the alcohol keeps flowing and joints continue to be rolled, the group goes through several rounds of the game. In one, Cyrus ends up in Reuben’s body but tells people he’s Forbes and tries to hook up with his college crush Nikki, although he is in a nine-year relationship with Shelby. Still with me? You might want to take this recap slowly because it’s about to get more complicated.

Shelby, who always sensed that Cyrus was more attracted to Nikki, tries to seduce him in Nikki’s body when she enters it the following round. Disturbed by her behaviour, however, Cyrus—now in Forbes’ body—turns her down.

Meanwhile, Maya and Reuben, who are having a hot—and I mean hot—secret affair, don’t hold back despite the fact that they are in other people’s bodies.

When Cyrus is in Reuben’s body, Maya seems to find the idea of kissing him in Nikki’s body quite titillating. She only withdraws when she realises that he is weirdly into the idea of getting to sleep with Nikki’s body since the real Nikki had rejected him in college. Likewise, Reuben hooks up with Brooke when she is in Maya’s body and he possesses Dennis’. As he whispers dirty things to her, it is quite obvious that he has no real interest in Brooke. Still following along?

The story falls completely off the rails when Reuben/Dennis and Brooke/Maya fall off the balcony during their impassioned sex and die. Panicked, the friends are now confronted with the question of who gets put back into whose bodies.

It’s What’s Inside doesn’t skate around the fact that the game is a very sexual experience for the friends and forces them to confront what they are attracted to. The inner person or their body?

Of course, this question cannot easily be answered. The body and self might appear separate but are, in reality, inherently combined and co-constitutive. Personhood derives from our experiences and experiences are enlivened, materialised, and situated in the world through the body.

So It’s What’s Inside brings up an interesting, but largely unexplored dilemma around sexual consent when body-swapping is involved. One of the key questions I kept asking myself was: would someone need consent from the person who owns the body before having sex in it?

The movie doesn’t seem to care too much about this glaring tension as it pushes the story forward by separating body and person—a tricky concept to swallow.

The body is mainly treated as a shell, potentially even a mask we put on, as the surprise ending of the movie indicates. If we look at life as a fully embodied experience, however, this clear separation isn’t possible, unless that’s all people ultimately care about; the surface. The film’s title would indicate otherwise though…

Overall, It’s What’s Inside is a really interesting attempt at grounding something as lighthearted as body-swapping in the horror genre, turning the film into an unconventional body horror that would probably gain a nod of approval from The Substance director Coralie Fargeat.

However, the ethical quagmire of whether a body can consent when the mind it belongs to isn’t in charge is one it elegantly bypasses.