No one could be gamer or goofier than Jamie Lee Curtis in this latest twist in the Freaky Friday body-swap franchise; she finds some distinctly likable form, plays broad comedy to the hilt and pretty much carries the movie – with the help of some nice supporting cameo turns – when her co-star Lindsay Lohan isn’t exactly nailing the laughs. And it should be said that as an essay in alternative existences and parallel realities, this film and Curtis’s starring role are far more interesting than the bafflingly overrated Oscar-winner Everything Everywhere All at Once.
The preceding film, from 2003, had Curtis and Lohan as a quarrelling mother and daughter who swap bodies due to the hilarious magical otherness of Chinese fortune cookies. (In 2025, the new version is a bit culturally lairy of gags like that.) It is based on Mary Rodgers’s 1972 novel, first filmed in 1976 with Jodie Foster as the daughter, a formidably precocious young star who was in those days considered to be already body-swapped into fierce adulthood. The publicity for this film promises legacy cameos and when one teen character talks about her French boyfriend, many FF fans will have been excitably wondering if this French boyfriend has a French-speaking mom played by a certain French-speaking star?
In this new contemporary reality, written by Jordan Weiss and directed by Nisha Ganatra, Curtis’s character Tess Coleman is a grandma, therapist and parenting podcaster, and her once-tearaway daughter, Lohan’s character Anna, is a music producer and single mom to a Gen-Z teen; this is Harper, played by Julia Butters, a young actor still legendary for her scene opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
When Harper has a big fight in school with her obnoxious, princess-y British lab partner, Lily (played by non-Briton Sophia Hammons), she is horrified when Anna falls hard for Lily’s hot single dad Eric (Manny Jacinto); these enemies are both appalled at the prospect of becoming stepsisters. This situation becomes even more complicated – freakier in fact – when a zany palm reader and fortune teller triggers a new cosmic body-swap nightmare, this time involving four women, not two.
Another version of this movie might have wanted to dip its toe into the issues of body image and identity: Freakier Friday keeps it light, partly as a result of Curtis’s jokey grandma, in whose knockabout generational presence there is no question of anything tricky. Curtis gets the laughs with her puppyishly uninhibited performance and there are some great gags, including one at the expense of oldsters who use a certain social media platform. There are also some amusing contributions from SNL trouper Vanessa Bayer as the fortune teller, comedian X Mayo as the school’s dyspeptic principal and Santina Muha as a US official who has to assess the authenticity of Anna and Eric’s marriage.
As for Lohan, she does a reasonable job, although her own body-swapped status as the legendary wild-child of old who is now playing a stressed middle-aged person has to remain unemphasised, simply because Lohan doesn’t really have the comedy chops. It’s Curtis who embodies the story’s wacky spirit.
Freakier Friday is out on 7 August in Australia and 8 August in the UK and US.