What’s inside It’s What’s Inside? Enough to make your head spin. In the new comedy-thriller, a body-swap game among a group of friends at a pre-wedding party goes horribly wrong — then those bodies get swapped again, and things get even worse. 

It can get a little confusing. Even writer-director Greg Jardin got a little mixed up writing it. “In that first outline, I literally just made a Photoshop diagram of eight people’s heads with their names,” Jardin tells Tudum. “And then I’d just put ‘This person is in this body now’ so I had it all visually.” (For a similar visual breakdown, check out our guide to the cast of It’s What’s Inside.)

But there’s one twist Jardin kept out of his diagrams — the true identity of Forbes (David Thompson). “Hopefully, everyone’s performance as Forbes will just have a new meaning upon rewatch,” Jardin says. “We put in a bunch of Easter eggs.” 

Read on to unearth just a few of those Easter eggs, and put together the final puzzle pieces of It’s What’s Inside.

Who is Beatrice?

Forbes’ mentally unstable sister, Beatrice (Madison Davenport), is introduced early in the film: In a photographic flashback, it’s revealed that her longtime crush on Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood) almost tore the friend group apart, after a college rager ended with police breaking up a fistfight between Forbes and Dennis. When the cops found Forbes’ high school–aged sister there, Forbes was expelled, and Beatrice wound up institutionalized. 

But that isn’t the end of the story, and one crucial detail could have clued you in to the truth. “When Forbes is explaining how to play the game, he says, ‘The Dungeon Master can’t make guesses, nor can she or he win,’ ” Jardin says. “Which is meant to be a very slight Easter egg [pointing] to the fact that it’s actually a female, not [a] male, saying that.”

As the film’s coda reveals, Forbes is actually Beatrice, who hijacked Forbes’ body after he foolishly tried to use the body-swap device to reconnect with her. So we don’t meet the real Forbes until the end, when he rolls up to the now-canceled wedding in Beatrice’s body, looking for his gizmo (and his own body, now occupied by Dennis). But Beatrice has already fled the coop in a different body, taking the machine — and Dennis’ trust fund — with her. 

Nailing this kind of high-concept rug pull might sound difficult for an actor, but Davenport saw it more simply. “Everyone else had a much harder job of being like, ‘OK, now I’m Maya’ and having to switch back and forth between so many characters,” Davenport says. “Whereas I was like, ‘OK, who’s Forbes?’ Forbes is a little bit of a partier — smart dude, but anger issues. And so I got to come in and [just] be that.”

Davenport also played Beatrice in the film’s brief, still-photo flashbacks. “For Beatrice, I was a more unhinged version of myself,” she says. “I’m pretty good about hiding my emotions and not losing my ever-loving mind when things don’t go my way. But that’s not Beatrice. She’s very good at planning: 10 years in the making, waiting for revenge.”

Thompson had a trickier task in the grand revenge plot — playing Beatrice, who’s playing Forbes. Other than in flashbacks, “technically, I’m never playing Forbes in the movie,” he says. “I was just trying to find different touchstones, different little mannerisms or quirks that would kind of help ground it. I’m in this new body that I’ve never been in. OK, so what are the differences? I have stubble for the first time. Now I have an Adam’s apple. How do I move?”

Thompson also tried subtly to play up Beatrice’s motivation: revenge. Her college hookup with Dennis and his gaslighting denial of it destroyed her life; Dennis’ onetime girlfriend Nikki (Alicia Debnam-Carey) is also on her hit list. 

At one point, Thompson took this inspiration a little too seriously. “I remember one day throwing a lot of shade towards Nikki, because I think I sort of blame her as well, that she took this man from me that I had seen a life together with,” he says. “I was being not too subtle with some animosity toward her. Greg toned it down a little bit.”

But Beatrice-as-Forbes also feels sympathy for one member of the group: Shelby (Brittany O’Grady). Beatrice “can relate to Shelby,” Thompson says. “Shelby and I have both been victimized in ways by these guys.” And both are about to get payback. 

Who ends up in whose bodies?

It doesn’t take long for the body swapping to get out of control. During Round 1, Cyrus (James Morosini) gets swapped into his friend Reuben’s (Devon Terrell) body but gets mislabeled as Forbes when Beatrice (in Dennis’ body, pretending to be Forbes) conspires to sneak away and steal Dennis’ trust fund. 

Then Cyrus finds Nikki in the basement, and things get even more complicated. Maya (Nina Bloomgarden) is currently in Nikki’s body, Maya and Reuben have a romantic history, and Cyrus has a not-so-secret crush on Nikki despite his long-term relationship with Shelby. The bizarre situation allows both to take advantage of their urges, and they kiss before heading back upstairs. 

“We have this couple that’s going through … intimacy issues, and they’ve both been on a variation of a diet of consuming artificial intimacy via screens,” Jardin says. “In a heterosexual relationship, if a man is essentially raised to be attracted to a certain beauty standard, and then his partner is not exactly what that beauty standard is, what does that do to her?”

Shelby isn’t coping well with Cyrus’ fixation on Nikki. She’s doing her best to indulge him, even going so far as to wear a blond wig in bed, but it’s seriously damaging her self-esteem. And then, in Round 2, she ends up in Nikki’s body. 

As this psychosexual drama plays out, tragedy strikes. When Reuben lands in Dennis’ body and Brooke (Reina Hardesty) swaps into Maya’s, Reuben and Maya’s mutual attraction comes to a head. The mismatched pair hook up on the roof — and then plunge to their deaths when the balcony’s wall gives out. Now Reuben’s and Brooke’s consciousnesses — as well as Dennis’ and Maya’s bodies — are dead. 

Everyone left is vying to get back into their own bodies, or into any living body. With tensions high, Dennis — in Cyrus’ body — calls the police and falsely confesses to the murder of Dennis and Maya. Cyrus — in Forbes’ body — desperately tries to convince Shelby to switch back into her own skin, but she resists when she learns he lied to her and kissed Nikki/Maya back in Round 1. 

For Thompson, the swap into Cyrus was one of the most exciting parts of the script. “It was fun to start off being this outsider weirdo catalyst who comes in and shakes things up,” he says, “and then such an awesome and unique opportunity to jump into a relationship as it’s collapsing.” Finally, Shelby cunningly proposes to Cyrus that she stay in Nikki’s body and he swap into Reuben’s. Then they can run off together and leave Cyrus’ body (with Dennis or whoever inside) to be hauled off to jail. 

After years of saying he loves Shelby the way she is, Cyrus agrees he’d prefer her to be in Nikki’s body — and thus unwittingly seals his fate. Because Shelby (thanks to a little advice from Beatrice) has, at long last, learned to accept herself. 

“It was important that Shelby’s character is biracial, because as a biracial person, I understand how there’s this inherent feeling that you don’t fully belong to either culture,” Jardin says. But her time in other people’s skin has given Shelby an understanding: She’ll be miserable as long as she’s chasing Cyrus’ approval instead of her own. So when the final swap happens, she sends herself and Cyrus back into their own skins. Dennis ends up in Forbes’ body, Maya in Brooke’s, Nikki in Reuben’s, Beatrice in Nikki’s. 

Which means, of course, that Cyrus ends up in jail. In the final scene, Shelby gives Cyrus a final kiss-off while visiting him. Earlier, Cyrus had sniped at Shelby to stand up for herself more, invoking a confrontation with a dental hygienist and telling Shelby that she should have told her to “Fuck on that, bitch!” So she says it to him instead — and hangs up the prison phone.

It’s What’s Inside is now streaming on Netflix. 

Spot the Biggest Easter Eggs from It’s What’s Inside