They don't call it the Golden Age of Streaming for nothing, by which I mean that most of the big companies attract at least as much attention for the amount of money they seem to have swilling around as for the quality of the stuff they put. Amazon is apparently committed to spending a billion dollars on its Tolkien fanfic show; the $300 million or so supposedly spent on The Crown starts to look like small change in comparison to that, though Netflix has also got that $19 billion net liability to think about. And let's not forget that one of the reasons why The Acolyte got canned was that its budget was $230 million and rising the last time anyone checked (which isn't far off a million dollars a minute).

Bearing all this insanity in mind, spending $17 million on a film actually looks quite a prudent piece of business on the part of Netflix, until you discover that the film in question (we're talking about It's What's Inside, directed by first-timer Greg Jardin) features no-one you're likely to have heard of and was made on a budget of $2.5 million. Someone at the company clearly lost their mind or had a huge amount of faith in an odd little indie movie: it was the biggest single purchase at this year's Sundance Festival.

Well, it was early in the year and the strikes were still on everyone's minds; perhaps that had something to do with it. I'm not peaking too early and saying this is a flat-out bad movie, just that paying seven times the budget for it seems like a bit of a punt considering what it's actually like to watch. Or perhaps I am wrong and this film is really connecting with younger audiences, I'm not sure.

You might want to pay special attention during it, anyway. The film concerns a group of friends who gather for the pre-wedding celebration of one of their friends, Reuben (Devon Terrell). Also there is an old friend, Forbes (David W Thompson) who nobody has seen in ages.

Forbes was always a big fan of games and has brought something new along for them all to play. This turns out to be a suitcase with a machine in it, and a lot of wires with electrodes on the end which attach to everyone's heads. The machine hums into life and suddenly everyone is startled and agitated: they've just had a collective out-of-the-body experience, or, to be more exact, an in-someone-else's-body experience.

The game is to attempt to guess who everybody 'really' is before swapping back to their original bodies, and, as some recreational substances are in play, everyone agrees (although some with more enthusiasm than others). This promises to be a night to remember, and it's not like anything can possibly go wrong, is it? Is it?

So, obviously, it's a neat idea for a film, with an SF conceit that (while obviously a bit implausible) has a lot of potential while also being thankfully cheap to realise – you just need people who can act to play the various different versions of the characters. It is, obviously, a great opportunity for a new writer-director to make a big impression.

Perhaps this is one of the issues with the film. It's What's Inside is bright and pacy and clever and treats the viewer with a degree of intelligence, and yet I still found that it left me feeling fairly cold. I couldn't quite figure out why that should be: there's nothing obviously wrong with the script, nor indeed with the direction, and yet�

I like custard. I like sausages. But I would decline if someone offered me both of them on the same plate. This is the two-great-tastes-that-just-don't-mix principle, but I'm still not entirely sure it applies to It's What's Inside. It's not a simple clash of tones or styles, but that different elements of the film seem to be actively conflicting with each other.

The direction of the film is certainly very eye-catching. In fact, I would say that this is one of the most ostentatiously, visibly directed films I have seen in a long time – the camera is always spinning around in a fancy 360-degree shot, or we're off into a flashback retelling some of the characters' history through a photomontage, or there's another camera movie that gives you vertigo – all of this with a garish, neon-hued colour palette. I don't want to sound patronising (well, not much) but I imagine you have to make films this way if you want to keep the attention of young people nowadays; they'll all be looking at their mobile telephones otherwise.

The problem, really, is that this is all happening in a film with seven major characters, most of whom have their own issues and relationships with many of the others. The film gets about three quarters of an hour to establish all of them before the fun and games with the body-swapping starts, which I'm not sure is long enough. And then you have to get your head round the fact that everyone is, functionally, suddenly someone else, and you have to keep in your head what you initially learned about them while also remembering what they look like now. And with the camera doing loop-de-loop and everything glowing purple� well, this makes it unnecessarily difficult. It's like trying to do a sudoku while bouncing downhill in a zorb, is all I'm saying.

There are some pretty good performances from the young cast, all of whom are obviously playing multiple roles, and the film explores some interesting ideas – being in a different body, it suggests, would naturally tend to loosen people's inhibitions and create the illusion they won't necessarily be held responsible for their actions. The aphrodisiac effect of a switch, and the various opportunities for role-play, also get explored, albeit in a superficial sort of way. In general the suggestion is that this sort of technology would tend to undermine the notion of personal identity, and promote a sort of general paranoia. But, as noted, all of this is squeezed and has to compete with the fun and games with the narrative voice.

As I say, some interesting ideas here, but Jardin-the-director's eagerness to show off what he can do really prevents Jardin-the-writer's script getting a chance to breathe and explore its ideas properly. Which is a shame. It also feels just a little bit superficial, dodging some of the deeper issues involved in questions of personality and embodiment – one of the white guys ends up in the body of someone who's African American, and vice versa, but none of the game participants switch gender or orientation. Maybe they're holding this back for the sequel which Netflix presumably have an eye on. There's certainly potential in this concept that doesn't properly get explored here.

Awix

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