Freaky (2020)

Christopher Landon has spent his recent career fusing the slasher template with a second, gentler genre, and Freaky pairs the teen murder spree with the body-swap comedy. A mystical dagger called La Dola trades a high schooler named Millie into the frame of a middle-aged serial killer, and the killer into hers. Vince Vaughn spends most of the runtime doing a teenage girl impression, which he performs with a commitment that borders on the archaeological. Kathryn Newton, meanwhile, gets the more enviable assignment: playing a homicidal maniac inside a mascot costume. The gore is plentiful, the pacing is brisk, and the film knows exactly which conventions it is borrowing.

The supporting cast carries a quiet degree of demographic variety. Celeste O'Connor appears as Nyla, Millie's best friend, and Misha Osherovich plays Josh, who is gay and openly so, a fact the screenplay acknowledges without turning it into a seminar. Josh survives longer than the genre usually permits, and the film's two screenwriters are themselves gay, which lends the material an ease that a more self-conscious production might have fumbled. The body swap allows Millie to borrow male strength and confidence before reclaiming her own, a modest gender inversion that the movie treats as a running gag instead of a thesis. Nyla's race is simply a fact of casting. The film has no interest in building anything on top of it.

Anyone searching for economic critique, environmental alarm, or a treatise on body acceptance will leave unsatisfied. The violence is recreational. The messaging, such as it exists, arrives through character and jokes instead of speeches, and the film is content to be a nasty, colorful entertainment with a decent heart and a better kill count. It is the sort of picture that wants to be liked, not obeyed.