It's What's Inside (2024) dir Greg Jardin
A low-budget, very mild horror / fantasy (not sci-fi, no science in this) / mystery drama. 8 mid-20s friends from college, 4 male, 4 female, get together for a party. I won't bother naming the actors; I didn't recognise any of them and all 8 are pretty much equally in the main roles. The party is hosted by brothers Reuben and Denis at the country house, somewhere in the USA, left to them by their wealthy artist-mother, full of her weird art-works. Last to arrive is Forbes, who some have not seen since college. We learn he got expelled following a party where his high-school sister got drunk, did some crazy stuff and ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Forbes now runs a gaming company. But it's not video games or board games. These are very strange types of game where the players basically plug their minds into a machine. He gives them a very quick “game” to start with, to demonstrate what it does. We don't see exactly what the characters experience during this, but it's clear they have some sort of hallucinations. After that all, eventually, agree to a longer game, where they experience even stranger things. I can't say more on that without major spoilers, just that we start to learn more about things that went on at college, something goes very wrong and the police end up involved. If it had just been this sort of thing I might have given it a higher score, but then they add on a bit at the end with a number of plot twists that just seemed unnecessary to me. I did find it confusing at times, again can't say exactly why without spoilers, and the plot twists at the end were confusing too. It tended to have the feel of something more like a high-school story about relationships; e.g. A wanted to date B, but B was more into C, so A ended up with D, and now D has found out, etc etc. The music was good, a mix of original (I think) and some Beethoven. Acting was nothing special, but it didn't require anything special. Some of the camera work and editing was fairly original, split screen with sometimes different filters on each part of the screen. I also quite liked one line about one of them who is a social-media influencer, I cannot remember the exact quote, but it was something like “No you do not work, you just take selfies and post them on Instagram. That's not a job!”
5 / 10