Director: Nisha Ganatra
Writers: Jordan Weiss, Elyse Hollander, Mary Rodgers
Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons, Manny Jacinto, Chad Michael Murray, Mark Harmon, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan

For many millennials (and perhaps some Gen Z), Freaky Friday was a real pop culture moment. With most of us being teens in 2003, this film (along with other Disney teen-based films) hit us right in our pubescent feels, perhaps more so for us who were the punk-rock types. Thus, it has always held a special place in our obsessively nostalgic hearts. The announcement of a sequel (pushed for initially by the queen that is Jamie Lee Curtis) was welcomed but with some trepidation. Do we really want to see a grown-up Anna? Will they have changed her too much? Will we still be able to relate? So many questions for a sequel that comes 22 years after the first. Is it just the temporary tonic we need while navigating our adult lives in a tumultuous world, or was it better left in the 00s?

Anna (Lohan) is now an ex-rock star music manager and single mother in her mid-thirties, while her mother Tess (Curtis) is a podcast-making author in her sixties. Anna quickly falls in love with and gets engaged to Eric (Jacinto), not realising that their respective teenage daughters, Harper (Butters) and Lily (Hammons), do not get along. When Anna’s Friday bachelorette party gets… freaky… Anna switches bodies with Harper and Tess switches bodies with Lily. Harper and Lily resolve to split their parents up, while Anna and Tess attempt to get everyone back in the right body once again.

One thing this film does well is balance nostalgia with originality. As much as we may have wanted to see a teen Anna again and to see her switch places with Tess, to recapture the entertainment we had twenty years ago, Anna has enough of her own adult issues for us to relate to, and it would likely be boring to see a repeat of Anna and Tess trying to understand each other again. The story takes some strange turns at times, and some scenes make it feel stretched out just for timing, but often the comedic scenes keep us from noticing too many peculiarities. Overall, things are kept relatively light-hearted (it is Disney, after all), and although not everyone will be able to relate to parenting, especially single parenting, there are plenty of other familiarities. Also feeding the nostalgia are things like Anna’s previous band Pink Slip (we definitely all had Take Me Away and Ultimate You burned on CDs and later on our MP3 players), Chad Michael Murray’s Jake returning with his unrequited crush on Tess, and Lohan and Curtis’s general onscreen mother-daughter chemistry, which, while a little different to mother and teen-daughter, is still as strong as it ever was.

While the film is set in the present (that being 2024/25) and updates its language, technology, characters etc. accordingly, it retains the timeless themes from the first film, namely mother-daughter relationships, unconventional families and generational differences. It refreshes its story to become more relevant to modern teens and its maturing original audience, but it doesn’t lose its overall messaging of love within biological and blended families. The relationships are either strong and grow stronger or begin weak and endure a lot to gain strength. It’s certainly relatable no matter which side you’re on. Neither has it lost its humour, with Curtis in particular being the recipient of most of the audiences’ laughter. There were some great references to the old film, and even one or two nods to other films (spot the Mean Girls reference for Anna and Eric’s wedding date…), and it was nice to see other characters returning (Tess’s husband Mark, Anna’s brother Harry, and Anna’s Pink Slip bandmates for example).

Seeing Lindsay Lohan return to the big screen felt like a big deal, like a homecoming. She has done television projects and smaller movies in the time since her last widely released movie in 2007, but Disney was where she got her start. She portrays Anna very well as a grown-up, gone are the teenage tantrums, however she’s not quite as physically expressive anymore (I’ve mentioned this before in my review of her Netflix Christmas movie Our Little Secret), so it’s a little strange in the more emotional scenes. Still, she manages to pull off physical comedy almost as well as she did twenty years ago. Then there’s Jamie Lee Curtis, who clearly had an absolute blast making this film. The fun just pores through her performance, her comedy on-point and her ability to flip between Tess and teenaged Lily coming across as effortless. It’s a joy to watch Curtis onscreen and to see how successful Tess has become. Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons were a little blah initially as their respective teenage stereotypes, but once they made the switch to adults-in-teen-bodies, they were both able to really prove their acting chops, particularly Butters. Manny Jacinto was mostly there for eye candy, with a fairly decent south England accent, but he had his sentimental moments (not to mention Eric being almost too good to be true as a partner for Anna). Having Chad Michael Murray return was also so much fun, and although it seems Jake hasn’t really changed all that much other than being a little more mature, he is definitely to us millennials now as he was to us back then as teenagers (swoon, she writes in her diary). There are plenty of fun supporting roles too, but the Best Supporting Actor award has to go to Mark Harmon’s Ryan, ever the wise one, ever the patient, understanding husband and stepfather.

If you were the right age when Freaky Friday was released and were a fan of the film, definitely rewatch it if you’re after that nostalgia hit, because Freakier Friday is a different kind of hit. It’s at once fresh, giving us characters who have clearly grown up and changed along with us and dealing with similar issues (but, apparently, with far cushier jobs and lifestyles), but also familiar, with characters also feeling like family. It’s not perfect, but it’s an entertaining romp that scratches the twenty-two-year itch and covers it with a soothing, theme-filled balm.