Why can't I stop thinking about Freakier Friday?

In the past three weeks, I have been airborne for approximately 35 hours. In this cumulative time, I watched ten films, the highlights of which include Weapons (Cregger, 2025), Rental Family (Hikari, 2025) and Blue Moon (Linklater, 2025). I rewatched Sinners (Coogler, 2025), confirming that, yes, even on a tiny screen subject to the seat recliner whims of the person in front of me, it is one of my favourite films of the past few years.

So why is the film I can’t stop thinking about Freakier Friday (Ganatra, 2025)?

I have an unabashed fondness for its predecessor, Freaky Friday (Waters, 2003). My housemate at uni had the soundtrack CD and we blasted it A LOT. Bowling for Soup, American Hi-Fi, The Donnas, Simple Plan. (This was the era of pop punk and we were all partaking in some concoction of pink hair dye, baggy cords, too much eyeliner and skate shoes.) I rewatched it a few months ago and it absolutely holds up as a fun, funny film.

It is also achingly of its time in one very specific way that only struck me on this recent rewatch, probably 15 years after I last saw it. There’s a scene where Chad Michael Murray’s character, Jake, is talking to Anna - Lindsay Lohan’s character, who is in this scene inhabiting the body of her mother Tess, played by Jamie Lee Curtis - about music, and Bowling for Soup’s cover of Britney’s ‘Baby One More Time’ is playing. Anna asks if it’s “lame” that she loves the song, and Jake assures her it’s not, because “this cover’s a classic”. The idea that it was tragic to like Britney’s version of the song - which was, and is, an absolute banging pop juggernaut - and only acceptable when re-hashed by an all-male punk rock band now falls squarely into the weird cool-girls-don’t-like-other-girls socialization we were all subject to in the early 2000s. (The fact that Freakier Friday features Jamie Lee Curtis holding up a Britney record is absolutely intentional vindication of this earlier moment.)

This Britney-related point is, tangentially, related to why I keep thinking about Freakier Friday, a film that is otherwise unremarkable. It’s fine. It’s cringy in places, mostly due to the lol-teens-today vibe that so many adult writers of teen films insist on cultivating (in the 2000s, this hung on things like mobile phones and self-actualisation; in the 2020s, it usually involves references to safe spaces, vegan cake and pronouns). It is needlessly complicated, due to the four (rather than two) switched bodies. It is, above all, relentlessly, clunkily unsubtle. The Exposition Van does a drive-by every few minutes to make sure you know that IN ORDER TO SWITCH BACK, THEY NEED TO UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER BETTER but also THIS IS HARD BECAUSE EVERYONE WANTS SOMETHING THAT IS FUNDAMENTALLY INCOMPATIBLE WITH THE DESIRE OF THE PERSON THEY’VE SWITCHED WITH.

That said, there are three reasons, I think, why this film kept tugging at my brain longer than I expected it to.

Firstly: this is a film that, despite the marriage plot at the centre of it, is almost entirely uninterested in its male characters. There are three men of any note in Freakier Friday: Ryan (Mark Harmon), Eric (Manny Jacinto) and Jake (CMM, reprising his original role). Eric is the guy that Anna is marrying and, after they meet, the film skips over their entire relationship with a quick credits photo montage. He’s widowed, he’s nice, he’s a chef. That’s all you need to know. Ryan, Tess’s husband, is also nice (and has all his own teeth). Jake owns a record store now. He’s nice too (not sure if it’s all his own hair - see above image).

What the film is interested in is the four women at its centre: Tess, Anna, Anna’s daughter Harper (Julia Butters) and Eric’s daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons). Specifically, it is interested in them being good at things they are interested in. Lily is interested in fashion, but this does not just manifest in her being a clotheshorse; she is also an aspiring designer. We see her drawings, we see her (as Tess) successfully styling a photoshoot on the fly, and we hear her talking about the London fashion school she aspires to attend. Harper, meanwhile, is a great surfer who wants to stay in Los Angeles to pursue the sport. It’s notable that one of the main sources of conflict between Harper and Lily is initially presented as a well-worn popular girl (Lily) vs. alternative girl (Harper) animosity, but this is quite deftly reconfigured as conflict over whose passion and skill will be sidelined in their parents’ decision of where to live after the marriage.

Tess and Anna are also allowed, within the confines of the film, to be unashamedly good at things. Tess is a celebrated psychologist preparing for a book tour; Anna is a music producer and manager who is also, secretly, still writing music despite not being in a band anymore. Like its predecessor, Freakier Friday relies a lot on slapstick and physical comedy, but it doesn’t resort to making any of the characters ditzy or incompetent. None of this should feel remarkable, and yet… it did? See also: depictions of adult women - Tess and Anna - who are not reduced to being frazzled, neurotic caregivers with no outside interests.

Second: the sisters thing. Given the ostensible focus of this substack, of course this gets a mention - the speed at which Harper and Lily declare themselves to be sisters is, frankly, mind-boggling. This is one of the narrative unsubtleties that is entirely understandable in a nuts-and-bolts, Disney-needs-to-get-you-from-A-to-B-with-minimal-pitstops kind of way, but is nevertheless jarring. In the space of a day, the girls go from being sparring classmates and reluctant stepsisters-to-be, to making heartfelt statements about the right place to be being wherever their sister is (I’m paraphrasing, barely).

I wrote about this in my book, the fact that the language of siblinghood, as with much of the language of family, cannot hope to contain the multitudinous meanings of what it is to be a brother or a sister. Is a sibling someone you share parentage with? Your most ride-or-die pal? The person you call at 3am when everything has gone to shit, because that’s the person who picks up the phone whether they want to or not, whether you last spoke five hours or five years ago? The person who knows the quickest way to make you laugh, who knows the most embarrassing things about you, or who is just the name next to yours on a family tree?

It’s safe to say Freakier Friday is not grappling with any of the complexities or subtleties of sisterhood, nor is it aiming to. Harper and Lily don’t like each other; they spend a day together, in their body-switched forms of Anna (Harper) and Tess (Lily); they start to understand each other’s perspective better (they got freaky-fridayed, y’all); congrats, guys, you’re now sisters. It’s neat, sure, but having spent a long time writing about films that really capture the nuances of siblinghood - including a lot of other teen/tween/family films - this one misses the mark as soon as it mistakes familial proximity for emotional sisterhood.

The third and final thing, and the one that comes right back around to the Britney-Lindsay of it all, is the scene where Pink Slip, Anna’s band from the first film, reunite on stage and Anna plays a guitar solo on her old red Telecaster. The whole scene is a callback to Freaky Friday, in which Tess (in Anna’s body) has to perform despite being unable to play guitar; in the wings, Anna, trapped in her mother’s body, plays for her. They fool the crowd (obvs), but this is also the moment that Tess realises that Anna is not just fucking about in a band, she’s a great musician. Arguably, this is the root of Freakier Friday’s persistent interest in girls being uncomplicatedly good at stuff - not as a plot point, but just as an incidental fact.

In Freakier Friday, Anna is on stage, about to play with her reformed band, but of course Anna is actually Harper. The real Anna, in her daughter’s body offstage, goes to replicate the old scenario, planning to play and have Harper mime along, but Harper subverts this by inviting Anna on stage and the two of them perform together. It is during this performance that the body-switches are reversed, and once Anna is back in her own body, there’s a close up of her hands playing that red guitar. It’s not a particularly dynamic piece of cinematography but it struck me at the moment of watching it that there is a weird sense of triumph in this shot, because this is a shot we’re not supposed to see.

Lindsay Lohan (like Nicole, like Amanda, like Britney) was meant to have a tragic ending. There has been a lot written about the vile way she was treated in the early 2000s, when the tabloids revelled in the disintegration of another former child star. The breathless, faux concern that was really just waiting, waiting, waiting.

She was not supposed to escape Hollywood, and she was not supposed to come back. This innocuous scene, of Lohan-as-Anna playing guitar, of having her moment of glory, is not supposed to exist. The fact that Anna is good at something is mirrored in the fact that Lohan is also good at something, and we get to see it because she survived.1 Sometimes films stick with you for reasons that have nothing to do with artistry. Sometimes that’s fine.