Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: IT’S WHAT’S INSIDE [Sundance Film Festival 2024 - Park City, Utah]

The conceptual structure of “It's What's Inside" [Midnight] plays very well in its attention to the idea of who people are. The McGuffin of the actual story is a little evasive in its actual practicality but is nonetheless effective without resorting to cliche, overwrought scenes. What it does do is place certain ideas of temptation, desire but also ambition and jealousy in an interesting cauldron and lets it bubble. Unlike "Saltburn" which was much more cruel in many ways, "Inside" shows people just unforseen with a bad consequence but hidden in a different arena of comeupannce and memory. The specific angle of this story is a group of friends reuniting the night before one of their own's wedding. This is not unlike a certain trigger point of say "Bodies Bodies Bodies". The difference is that, like many Midnight films at Sundance this year, it doesn't need to resort to simple blood and gore as far as the shock factor to make its concept effective. This is an interesting and welcome shift in many ways. Forbes (played by David Thompson) is the man supposedly with a plan, a reason for revenge, a texture of (would be) misguided memory and maybe a little jealousy. The use in specific montages of photo flashes of memories of what happened really is simple and yet ingenious and yet it only has to do with who is telling the story.

The plot ploy of the game they actually play is what makes this movie so ingenious. If one simply goes with this auspice, it is a like an updated version of "Clue" sans the violence but with a genre twist. The key to the story is Shelby. Thwarted by a clueless and cowardly boyfriend, her estimations, in whatever form she takes on, shapes the movie, especially as one turn makes things undeniably complicated but wonderfully parallel to fleeting opportunities found through others. The game per se is set up in Round One and Round Two to lure the audience and is built to create a situation that is intenable which is both undeniable and unqiue. The third act titled Coda reveals something a little more mythology based which opens this up to an interesting broader world whereas Act 1 and Act 2 are more self contained. It all depends on how it might be marketed. While the concept of the movie does open itself more to something broader in a franchise-setting, this origin structure is using pre-conceived notions of personalities in this iteration to really highlight the context of who people think they are versus what others suspect, want or hope them to be. A-

By Tim Wassberg