The pair are headed for a friendship reunion, to celebrate the wedding of old pal Reuben (Devon Terrell); this is also how we meet Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey), their social-media-influencer friend who posts myopic selfies with captions like “About last night”, “Where to this time?” or simply “Outdoors”. But when somewhat estranged acquaintance Forbes (an excellently creepy David W. Thompson) shows up, with a mysterious briefcase containing an outlandish sci-fi body-swap game, everyone begins to lose their minds — or at least, temporarily misplace them.
It is written and directed by Greg Jardin, making his feature debut, a hugely impressive first attempt: dripping with style and invention, edited to within an inch of its life. It begins with some extreme close-up, abstract-macro-photography opening titles, Fight Club-style, and there are clever uses of split-screen, extreme neon lighting, photographic montage flashbacks, acrobatic camera moves, and consistently surprising music choices (from Rossini’s ‘L’italiana in Algeri’ to Charles Williams’ ‘Theme from The Apartment’ to The Walker Brothers). It’s as if Edgar Wright had a baby with a TikTokker.
Jardin’s emphasis on style and verve can feel excessive at times, but for this particular story it doesn’t actually seem out of place. Its excess is the animating engine of the film: a story about the superficiality of the modern world, and the masks we put on. While it’s admittedly not always easy keeping track of who is wearing which body-swapped mask — Jardin sometimes gives us a stylized, red-lit glimpse behind the curtain of who’s who — it is an undeniably compelling, frequently surprising, deeply trippy trip: the Freakiest of Fridays.