Mehnificent

God help me, I got dirty thoughts watching this movie. That’s as fitting a confession as any because “It’s What’s Inside” operates on the queasy, ticklish nerve where comedy, anxiety, lust, and a weird species of social dread all mingle together in the trunk of an Uber, hungry for a fight or a kiss. I love when a film makes you wonder, in the cackling recesses of your mind, “What would I do if I were dropped inside someone else’s body for a night?” Not just the old switcheroo, but the real, squirming, terrifying, exhilarating thing—and not with anonymous ninnies, mind you, but your oldest, most untrustworthy friends.

Every now and then, Hollywood hatches a marketing campaign so clever it's almost tempting to review the movie poster and be done with it. “Longlegs,” the latest generation of viral internet bogeyman, slithered into theaters on a fog of clickbait. It arrived, stuffed to the gills with promises—a “new Silence of the Lambs,” “the scariest movie of the century!”—as if mere dread could be manufactured wholesale, like bootleg perfume. I kept waiting for the stench of brimstone to hit me in the nose, but mostly all I caught was the distinct aroma of overbaked expectation.

Criminal is the kind of mongrel thriller that seems almost tailor-made to attract critical enmity: jigsaw plotting, characters that come apart if you prod them, and a magpie casting philosophy that shuffles through A-listers as if Hollywood were a novelty gumball machine. The reviews online drip with the sourness of dashed hopes—critics, wringing their hands about “wasted potential,” all but begging the film to be thrown back into the genre stockpot for more seasoning. And yet, perversely, that’s the exact pitch that drew me in. Give me talent forced to dance on rickety scaffolding over mediocrity any day; how else would we ever be surprised?

There are movies that tug you under, not with suspense or terror, but with the blithe, inexorable weight of their own conventions. "You're Killing Me," directed by Beth Hanna and Jerren Lauder, tries to strut through the haunted funhouse of privilege and amorality, but somewhere along the way, it gets lost in its own fog machine. I wanted shock, I wanted stakes—hell, I wanted something that didn’t leave me counting ceiling tiles during the third act.