Cinema, as of late, has really taken advantage of nostalgia and the good faith that audiences will hold onto such and turn out for a years-later legacy sequel. The last few years alone have given us continuations to such once-dormant properties as Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Top Gun, Scream, Halloween, and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and, for the most part, viewers have been enthusiastic enough to propel such titles to renewed relevance.
In the case of Freakier Friday, a sequel to 2003’s surprisingly fruitful Freaky Friday, itself a remake of a 1970s Jodie Foster family flick, it’s working off not only the continued interest in revisited IPs, but Disney’s seemingly successful pivot from originally-intended Disney+ streaming titles to full-fledged theatrical blockbusters; see both Moana 2 and Lilo & Stitch, which each broke over a billion dollars at the global box office, proving their move from home screens to the cinema was wise.
Additionally, stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan are in the midst of their own career resurgences, with Curtis, now a minted Academy Award winner, having ridden the wave of the Halloween reboot sequels’ success over the last decade to maintain prime placement in the Hollywood studio system, and Lohan having completely rehauled her public image, moving into Netflix titles to test her waters as a leading lady once more, before stepping back into House of Mouse prominence.
And on the mention of both Curtis and Lohan, we’re completely unsurprised in watching them effortlessly slip back into their roles of mother and daughter, Tess and Anna Coleman, and how director Nisha Ganatra (Late Night, The High Note) and screenwriter Jordan Weiss (TV’s Dollface) play to the actresses’ strengths of both being adept at comedy and drama; it can’t be stressed enough how truly correct it feels to see Lohan once again at the forefront of a comedy such as this.
Some 22 years on from the events of Freaky Friday, where rule-follower Tess and her rebellious teen daughter Anna were body swapped in the lead-up to Tess’s nuptials to Ryan (Mark Harmon, also returning), following a fortune cookie-gone-rogue situation that forced the two to walk in each other’s literal shoes in order for them to understand each other’s emotional predicaments, the two haven’t revealed just exactly what took place, but it has indeed brought the two closer for the duration of their relationship in the years since. To Anna, Tess may be a little too accommodating, and it’s only brought Anna’s teenage daughter, Harper (Julia Butters), closer to grandmother dearest.
Despite their ups and downs, the three of them are a neat collective, which makes Anna quickly falling for handsome chef Eric (Manny Jacinto) not ideal from Harper’s perspective. Not that she doesn’t want to see her mother happy, but Eric’s daughter happens to be Harper’s snooty nemesis, Lily (Sophia Hammons), and with the two already at odds at school, learning that they are soon to be step-sisters doesn’t remotely ease their tension. Anna and Eric are hoping that forcing the two to spend more time together will help them crack through their stubborn exteriors, but it only drives them further apart, and when Lily learns that Eric is considering permanently moving them to California to be with Anna and Harper, an eruption of emotion seeps out.
With the two girls wishing to be away from each other, and tensions rising between Tess and Anna over how to parent (and grand-parent), the cryptic sprouting of meddling psychic Madame Jen (an enjoyably off-kilter Vanessa Bayer) sets the body swapping in motion, with Tess and Anna swapping bodies with Lily and Harper, respectively, and vice-versa. After navigating the initial shock, Weiss’s script plays with the motions you’d expect – Lily and Harper in the bodies of considerable adults realising the power they hold, Anna and Tess in the embodiments of youngsters taking advantage of fast metabolisms and youthful energy – before wrapping the farcical nature of proceedings in a genuine sense of emotional gravity.
Lily and Harper honing their own selfish senses means their prime objective in the bodies of Tess and Anna is to break up Anna and Eric. It’s mean spirited and gives way to some of the film’s more serious beats, but Weiss’s script never demonizes the teenage duo, which helps us at least understand their point of view; it also leans into one of the film’s funniest sequences where Harper (as Anna) tries her hardest to flirt with her mother’s former high-school beau, Jake (Chad Michael Murray), hoping he’ll profess his love and put the wheels in motion for the wedding to be broken up. Lohan’s comedic timing and vanity-free abandon is a thing of beauty to behold, and when Freakier Friday allows her and Curtis to embrace their inner teenager, the film is all the better for it.
But Freakier Friday is ultimately more than just body swapping shenanigans. It has a lot of fun with the premise, and it should be noted how great both Butters and Hammons are when they need to inhabit Harper and Lily as Anna and Tess, but, at its core, it’s a sweet familial-honouring comedy that celebrates the unique, complicated, ever-loving bond between mothers and daughters. Ganatra’s film isn’t alienating the general relationship between a parent and their child by no means, but it’s difficult to deny how special Freakier Friday will be for mothers and daughters, both those that saw the original and have grown since, and a new generation being introduced here.
From an original cinema standpoint, it is a shame that we aren’t seeing more studios take risks on untapped narratives, but in the grand scheme of reboots, sequels and remakes, something like Freakier Friday justifies its existence. It’s facilely funny and heartwarming, utilising its premise with aplomb as it fluidly folds Curtis and Lohan back into this universe. A long-gestating sequel actually worth the wait? Freaky, indeed.
FOUR STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Freakier Friday is screening in Australian theatres from August 7th, 2025, before opening in the United States on August 8th.
