3 months ago
10
By Jake Wiilson
August 6, 2025 — 5.24pm
FREAKIER FRIDAY ★★½
(PG) 111 minutes
The body swap concept never gets old, but pulling it off is harder than it looks. To begin with, you need a pair of uncommonly gifted comic performers, one preferably in their mid-teens.
Jamie Lee Curtis (left) and Lindsay Lohan are back in Freakier Friday.Credit:
At least two of the best examples are called Freaky Friday: the first in 1976 with Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster; the second in 2003 with Jamie-Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan. Both were based on Mary Rodgers’ young adult novel, published in 1970 when the generation gap between teenagers and their parents yawned wider than it has since.
Nisha Ganatra’s “legacy sequel” Freakier Friday doesn’t live up to either of its predecessors. Still, it’s a likeable movie, even if it strains a little to demonstrate its good nature – and it marks a welcome comeback for Lohan, who retains the knack for comic vulnerability she had as a young adult.
The set-up is complicated, with three generations of women now sharing the same home in sunny LA. Curtis’ character Tess Coleman is largely retired as a psychiatrist, but has found new success as an author and the host of the podcast Rebelling With Respect.
Julia Butters (left) and Sophia Hammons join the body swap fun in Freakier Friday.
Tess’ daughter Anna, played by Lohan, was an aspiring rock-and-roller in high school, but in her 30s has settled for being the manager and confidante of Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), a young pop star with emotional troubles of her own. She’s also now the mother of teenage Harper (Julia Butters).
Tess can’t resist interfering with Anna’s parenting, while Harper’s main interests are surfing and looking surly. Still, as a family unit they’re reasonably stable, until Anna announces she and Harper will be moving to London to form a new blended family with Eric (Manny Jacinto) and Eric’s snooty daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons), who’s around Harper’s age.
Time for everyone to learn some lessons about how the other half lives, courtesy of a flaky palm reader and part-time Starbucks barista played by Vanessa Bayer (who’s on screen for about four minutes, gets to say anything she likes and is the funniest person in the film).
So it is that Tess swaps places with Lily, Anna swaps with Harper, and all four have to race around town trying to get things back to normal in time for the wedding, not to mention Ella’s big concert.
As in all such sequels, some form of doubling down on the original premise was inevitable. But more in this context isn’t necessarily more: if anything, it dilutes the formula. Ultimately, we’re led to feel the Coleman women are all similarly laid-back-yet-fretful Californian types, which fatally softens the central joke.
Having pushed things as far as they do, Ganatra and screenwriter Jordan Weiss might have done better to give us a cascading, increasingly outrageous series of swaps – perhaps taking a hint from Christopher Landon’s 2020 horror-comedy Freaky, where the teen heroine (Kathryn Newton) finds herself in the body of a male, middle-aged serial killer (Vince Vaughn).
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True, anything along those lines might have limited how successfully the film could be marketed as a mother-daughter bonding experience in the manner of Barbie.
That said, if the goal was to appeal to young and old alike, it’s odd Curtis and Lohan are nearly the whole show, cruising around town in a red convertible and playing it much more broadly than Butters and Hammons.
Still, Freakier Friday is a pleasant enough nostalgia trip provided you’re Lohan’s age or older. Younger viewers may see it more as something for their parents.
Freakier Friday is released in cinemas on August 7.
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