Netflix made the largest acquisition out of Sundance 2024, paying $17 million for Greg Jardin’s psychological thriller about a reunited group of college friends and a party game gone wrong.

It’s easy to see what prompted Netflix to pony up a cool $17 million for Sundance Midnight entry It’s What’s Inside. A frantically paced, visually flashy psychological thriller with elements of sci-fi and horror, writer-director Greg Jardin’s first feature paves the way for a sequel, perhaps even a franchise. The central device — which press notes request be kept under wraps — would just need to find its way into the hands of a new group of attractive 20-somethings with uncomfortable secrets to be revealed. No star salaries are required and it pretty much all takes place in a single setting.

But all the nervy cutting, the pirouetting pans and off-kilter angles, the dexterous split-screen and the bombardment of eclectic music cues — many of them dropped in with archly emphatic force — can only distract from the lack of depth for so long. As the plot becomes more contorted, its dangerous party game challenging the audience right alongside the characters to keep track of who’s who, the stylistic flourishes start to become intrusive. Especially when the movie is basically a high-concept rehash of 2022’s Bodies Bodies Bodies, with less of the wicked satirical zing.

Shelby is first seen applying lipstick and cooing provocatively into a mirror while half-listening to an Instagram video posted by another college friend, popular influencer Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Clarke), who shares selfies and tutorials about spicing up relationships and other topics on which she’s a self-appointed expert. She calls her “work” Nikkipedia. The advice doesn’t seem to be doing much for Shelby; she’s fed up with Cyrus getting busy with online porn but showing minimal sexual interest in his longtime girlfriend.

Jardin provides a winking tipoff of complications to come later by having Shelby don a wig not unlike Nikki’s long blond tresses for her abortive roleplay attempt to get Cyrus in the mood.

Shelby’s petulance makes her want to back out of attending the wedding, but they head off anyway, barely speaking as they take the Oregon mountain roads to a palatial estate tucked away among the pine trees. The fancy joint was owned by Reuben’s late mother, an artist whose giant metal vagina sculpture is hard to miss right out front.

None of these people is someone with whom you’d want to spend a night at Vagina Mansion, or whatever it’s called. But unlike the Gen Z houseguests in Bodies Bodies Bodies, whose vapidity yielded caustic humor, this bunch is so lacking in dimension as characters they’re just interchangeably dull. Or annoying. The script doesn’t explain why Reuben’s closest friends are people who have mostly not stayed in touch.

After they all hit the wine and weed hard enough to get relaxed, Reuben drops the news that he’s invited Forbes (David Thompson), a “weird genius” who was expelled from college under a cloud after some shady business at a party involving his unstable younger sister. He has supposedly been off somewhere working in tech ever since. Right on cue, Forbes walks in acting cagey and holding a large green suitcase that he doesn’t seem to want to let out of his hands.

It soon emerges that the suitcase contains some mysterious, top-secret gadgetry that Forbes and “my team” have been working on. He’s brought it along to try out on them as an elaborate party game. What it actually does won’t be revealed here; let’s just say it’s the equivalent of the ceramic hand in Talk to Me, providing an intense 20-second experience. But no one in a quasi-horror movie ever had much time for moderation, so after a trippy first round they go back for more, which is when the trouble starts.