‘Freakier Friday’ is out of touch

This initial setting has promise. Tess, despite having settled into the kindlier, more relaxed role of a grandmother, is still an overbearing presence in Anna’s life, while Anna has taken on an amusingly Tess-like demeanor with her own daughter after all these years. But there’s a bizarre and unintentional nondescript-ness to Harper that renders the whole premise wonky. Beyond a sign on her bedroom door that says “No TRIGGERING, this is my SAFE SPACE”—not how a kid would use either of those terms, but okay—there’s little by way of festering tension between mother and daughter, the way a teenage Anna once wanted to attend an audition the day of Tess’s rehearsal dinner. The 2003 film by Mark Waters was hardly groundbreaking, but it had some semblance of personal stakes rooted in character.

Instead, the 2025 version introduces the external wrinkle of Harper’s high school enmity with fashion-forward English “it girl” Lily Reyes (Sophia Hammons), whose single restaurateur father Eric (Manny Jacinto) has a meet-cute with Anna early on. The movie quickly fast-forwards through their courtship until the two are engaged. Harper dreads the idea of moving to London, while Lily detests becoming part of the Colemans’ Angelino family, and the possibility of becoming stepsisters sickens them both.

This is where the movie’s remixed take on the material comes in. Through some magical happenings, courtesy of fortune teller Jen (Vanessa Bayer)—and sans the original’s strange orientalism—all four of them swap places overnight. On one hand, the original’s mother-daughter switcheroo remains intact, as Anna trades places with her own daughter this time. However, the aging Tess ends up switching with the image-obsessed Lily, which yields some fun physical comedy at times, but doesn’t have nearly the same kicks, since the two characters don’t really have a relationship to play off. What’s more, the original’s fable-like telling depended on two characters seeing themselves through the other’s eyes, but Freakier Friday is bifurcated in an incredibly unhelpful manner.

Harper and Lily, in Anna and Tess’s bodies, try to sabotage the upcoming nuptials so they don’t have to grow up in the same household, while Anna and Tess, in the kids’ bodies, end up going to school, and try to track down Jen. But the moments where characters are paired up with their corresponding parent/child figures are few and far between, rendering the story’s core premise—the idea of truly understanding someone else—practically null until the final act, when the actors are finally afforded the chance to play opposite their corresponding “selves.”

 

There’s some fun to be had along the way, even though the movie flounders without any real countdown or sense of urgency. Director Nisha Ganatra introduces some fun flourishes early on when it comes to framing the magical setting, but beyond the characters’ realizations of what’s happened, there are seldom moments when the performers are allowed to let loose through melodramatic comedy—but they do their best. Butters does a remarkable impression of Lohan, and eventually settles into a distinctly early-aughts appearance (despite Anna’s pre-swap self having a more contemporary appearance), while Hammons remains noticeably centered in her role as a grandmother.

However, the reunion of Lohan and Curtis is the movie’s selling point. Despite Harper and Lily being devoid of any real character—they’re Gen Z kids filtered through an elder-millennial lens, conforming to well-outdated archetypes—the movie creates enough bizarre scenarios for the screen veterans to gladly embarrass themselves. They’re a treat to watch, even if the movie lacks any real direction, and truncates much of its second act to a lengthy montage of random moments, instead of actually drawing from its own specifics.

Take, for instance, Lily and Eric’s English Filipino background. Jacinto is charming, but struggles to maintain a coherent accent, so he ends up distracting at times, and the whole idea of an older white woman in an Asian teenager’s body (and vice versa) ends up a total non-factor, despite its potential for awkward hilarity. In a movie about outward perception, opting for a race-blind route is the coward’s way, though it feels part and parcel of the movie’s awkward construction. It’s entirely possible that Lily and Eric weren’t initially conceived as part Asian, but Hammons’ and Jacinto’s casting doesn’t appear to have altered this one iota (beyond one fleeting interaction between Lily-as-Tess and her Filipino grandparents), resulting in comedic and dramatic material left on the cutting room floor. After all, Lily’s entire deal is that she’s an outsider and recent immigrant to the United States, so for her ethnicity to not play a factor is a little strange.

Similarly, a number of other jokes and settings feel like conflicting products of multiple, contradictory drafts. None of these are particularly egregious in and of themselves—a character brings his car and his bike to work? Why not—but they add up after a point, especially when it ought to matter. Anna, as seen through Harper’s eyes, is written as a woman who gave up her dreams for her daughter, but that she has a successful professional career regardless doesn’t speak to the kind of maternal sacrifice the movie hopes to center with its emotional denouement. Instead of fine-tuning these details, or creating any semblance of lives for its younger characters outside their household, Freakier Friday spends outsized time on a subplot involving one of Anna’s clients (a popstar played by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), robbing the central story of valuable time.

The allure of a tale like this one is seeing actors slip into each other’s role, but it doesn’t work nearly as well when half the lead characters—i.e. the movie’s teenagers—don’t really have coherent personalities beyond their appearance. It’s especially ironic for a film series about looking past these façades, but the comedy in Freakier Friday is rarely about anything deeper than what people wear. It’s a decent escape at times, but you might not be able to shake the feeling that it could have been so much more.