Body swap movies have been around longer than you may think. Films like Turnabout and Here Comes Mr. Jordan came out in the 40’s. However, most point to 1976’s Freaky Friday as the popularization of the plot device, particularly in comedy. This led to some horrible films like 18 Again! and Like Father Like Son, but also led to fantastic films like Big (arguably Tom Hanks greatest performance), Heaven Can Wait, All of Me (possibly Steve Martin’s greatest performance) and Being John Malkovich. It also led to 2020’s Freaky, a body switch movie that proposes what would happen if a typical teenage girl swapped bodies with a psychotic killer.

This film comes from Blumhouse (with Universal distribution) with directing and screenwriting by Christopher Landon, who also wrote and directed the Happy Death Day franchise films, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones,  and Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse. (FUN FACT: Christopher Landon is the son of Michael Landon, himself starting his career in horror as the star of I Was a Teeenage Werewolf.) The pedigree of the film certainly was promising going in.

The casting was absolute perfection. Vince Vaughn checks both boxes of what you want in this movie. Vaughn is best known for his comedies such as Wedding Crashers and Dodgeball. However, he is a physically imposing man standing 6’5” which is tall IRL let alone in Hollywood, a land where many of the top leading men are of diminutive stature. Also, and this is oft forgotten in his filmography, Vaughn played a psycho once before as Norman Bates in Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. An actor equally adept at the horror and comedy elements this format is what I call perfect casting.

Leading the predominantly young cast is Vince’s swap partner, Kathryn Newton, moving from television to movies over the past two decades though I suspect I’ve just seen the role people will remember her from best. Her performance is as important as Vaughn’s and leads us to invest in her character as it moves from her body to Vaughn, who does a great job playing her as a character and not a caricature. It is very comparable to Jack Black’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle performance a few years back. Newton’s performance seems less showy in comparison but more grounded. Newton can’t bank on people remembering past characterizations and point to them as shorthand…she needed to mark her own territory. I honestly felt when the killer was in her body, she was even more menacing.

Another great, yet smaller role, was held down by Alan Ruck, best remembered as Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. This time, he is the authority figure with a part you expect to go one way and veers off for a nice surprise prior to leaving the film’s plot.

It’s pretty obvious from the setup, comedy would be the emphasis of the film, so it is a fair question: do the horror elements work? The answer: for the most part. Because you buy into the characters, there are some real scenes of suspense that take you by surprise. There are also some very violent, gory kills that fill the requirements of the slasher film fan as well. It attempts some poignancy as well with a frayed family situation, and this is where I feel the film does not succeed as well. It might be a case of stuffing the script with too many unnecessary elements. Sometimes, it is those details that draw you into a film, but in this case, I saw elements such as the father’s death and mother’s battle with the bottle as superfluous and unnecessary.

The film flies along at just over 100 minutes and that seems like the perfect length. I find myself hoping it doesn’t lead to a sequel as the story is told and complete just as it is. Currently, it has doubled its tiny $6 million budget at a time where making your money back at all is quite an accomplishment. The legacy of this film is yet to be written, but I think like the best horror film of the year that came out early (The Invisible Man) this will be one of those films people will point to and say, “That idea should not have worked. It’s too out there. And yet, it succeeded.”

Grade: A

Freaky (2020)