Freakier Friday (dir. Nisha Ganatra)

by Jack Martin | Aug 7, 2025

Certificate: PG

Running Time: 111 mins

UK Distributor: Disney

UK Release Date: 8 August 2025

WHO’S IN FREAKIER FRIDAY?

Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons, Manny Jacinto, Mark Harmon, Chad Michael Murray, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Rosalind Chao, Vanessa Bayer, Christina Vidal Mitchell, Haley Hudson, Ryan Malgarini, Lucille Soong, Stephen Tobolowsky, Jordan E. Cooper, Elaine Hendrix, Chloe Fineman

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Nisha Ganatra (director), Jordan Weiss (writer), Kristin Burr, Jamie Lee Curtis and Andrew Gunn (producers), Amie Doherty (composer), Matthew Clark (cinematographer), Eleanor Infante (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A mother and daughter (Curtis and Lohan) find themselves body-swapping with a new generation…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON FREAKIER FRIDAY?

It’s actually quite miraculous that a sequel to Freaky Friday, the beloved 2003 Disney body-swap comedy, exists at all. In the twenty-plus years since its debut, the careers of its stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan – their casting arguably being the reason why the film works at all – have had their fair share of highs and lows, enough to where a return to a much sillier, family-friendly premise might seem beneath them in some way. Then again, Curtis now has an Oscar for playing a multiversal lover with hotdog fingers, and Lohan was recently in a Netflix film where actual-honest-to-God Santa Claus triggered an avalanche that gave her amnesia, so having their minds and bodies switched around once more might not be too far-fetched for either of them at this point.

Either way, they’re back at it again in Freakier Friday, which like its predecessor is endearingly wacky and often rather funny, primarily because its two leads are genuinely fantastic together and really do seem to bring out the best in one another.

Directed by Nisha Ganatra, replacing original director Mark Waters (which, given the trajectory of his career as of late with Netflix stinkers like He’s All That and Mother of the Bride, is probably for the best), the film quickly reintroduces us to the mother-daughter duo of Tess (Curtis) and Anna (Lohan). The latter is now a music manager as well as a single parent to moody teen Harper (Julia Butters), while the former is embracing her role as grandmother that habitually oversteps her adult daughter’s boundaries. Anna soon meets and falls for fellow single parent Eric (Manny Jacinto), a British chef, and they eventually get engaged to the delight of everyone – that is, except for Harper, who cannot stand her soon-to-be step-sister Lily (Sophia Hammons), and unfortunately the feeling is mutual.

Of course, it’s at this point, just days before Anna and Eric’s wedding, that an encounter with amateur psychic Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer) causes a major multi-generational body swap: Anna is now Harper, Tess is now Lily, and vice versa both times. However, while Anna and Tess (as Harper and Lily respectively) attempt to figure out how to undo their repeated nightmare, Harper and Lily (as Anna and Tess respectively) surmise that they now have an opportunity to put a stop to their parents’ marriage before it’s too late, with a plan that involves bringing Anna’s old high school boyfriend Jake (Chad Michael Murray) back into the fray. Hijinks, inevitably, ensue.

It’s easy at first to get tangled up in deducing who’s in who’s body, for after a stretched-out opening act the movie zips along pretty fast as soon as they switch, leaving little time to piece together which person is which before numerous other sub-plots, one involving a heartbroken pop star and another having to do with a pickleball tournament, get underway. Luckily, it’s not too long after the initial confusion that you can tell everyone apart, and what Freakier Friday does rather well, perhaps even more so than the first film, is give its four main actors specific traits that help make them distinguishable from one another. Curtis’s Tess, for instance, has the soul of a British teen inside of her, so every now and then she’ll randomly drop some English slang in the middle of her American-accented sentences, while Hammons’s Lily is conversely ecstatic that her body can actually move without breaking something (one of many old-people jokes that Curtis’s character is now the butt of). Lohan and Butters’ characters are a bit more similar which does make it trickier to differentiate between the two, but there’s still just enough uniqueness among them to feel as though you’re watching two different people, albeit ones who happen to be in each other’s bodies.

Ganatra captures the sparky feel of the 2003 original through plenty of heightened sequences that play neatly into the silliness of it all, enough to where at times it really does feel like a Disney film from the early 2000s. The quality of physical slapstick as well as some of the performances almost rival that of something you’d find on the Disney Channel in that era, and early on there’s even a schoolyard food-fight that looks like a scene from Danny DeVito’s Matilda, complete with a mime who’s randomly just there in the background but nonetheless adds to the oddball kid-centric hilarity. Inevitably, there’s also a fair number of references and callbacks to the original, including certain soundtrack choices and a couple of unexpected appearances, but they’re surprisingly far and few in between, as Ganatra and screenwriter Jordan Weiss keep the focus more on the current situation with these main characters, both old and new, rather than playing on the audience’s nostalgia as much lesser legacy sequels tend to do.

But truly, as in Freaky Friday before it, Freakier Friday works purely because of Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan. Both are on hilarious form as they have the comedic timing and physicality of their characters (including that of the teens who are literally inside of them) nailed all the way down, and since they have a lot more scenes together in this one their chemistry is expanded to be even more endearing than it already was twenty-two years ago. Props, too, to newcomers Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons who do great at playing well beyond their years but are also not exempt from some of the wilder moments of physical comedy, though you can tell their performances were stylised heavily after their elder veterans, which is not a bad thing whatsoever as it makes all four of them stand out as bright and energetic comedic performers.

Without either of them, Freakier Friday simply would not have worked as well as it does, so it’s a miracle that they’re not only back but thriving in these roles in a legacy sequel which recognises that they very much are its legacy.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Freakier Friday is a fun-filled legacy sequel that benefits enormously from the fantastic comedic chemistry between Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, while the film itself overcomes its initial chaotic nature with charmingly silly humour and nostalgic callbacks that don’t distract from the main narrative.