In Freakier Friday, Lindsay Lohan gives the performance we didn't know we needed

TO DESCRIBE just how meaningful the Lindsay Lohan-Jamie Lee Curtis remake of Freaky Friday was to a 13-year-old in 2003, T’ll use an anecdote.

- By Esther Zuckerman

Shortly after seeing the movie with my mom, she asked me if I wanted to get a second piercing in my ear, a gesture that meant the world to an awkward tween desperate for some edge. My mom understood that Lohan in that movie was the pinnacle of cool, and that she could in turn gain some cred, just like Curtis on screen, if she submitted to my whims. Meanwhile, I got a little closer to approximating Lohan’s perfect teen aura. In the early 2000s she was an influencer before that was even a term, the most famous girl in the world, who seemed destined for unstoppable greatness.

That was the magic of the movie, directed by Mark Waters, which updated the body-swap plot to the early ’00s with a lot of heart and a little bit of pop punk. The movie succeeded because of how equally balanced it was to the perspectives of mother and daughter — with Curtis and Lohan both turning in genius comedic performances that were funny but never felt mocking.

Still, as much as I loved Freaky Friday, it was hard to imagine that a sequel coming more than 20 years later could recapture any of the glory of its predecessor. After all, in the interim years we watched Lohan’s very public fall from glory, hounded by tabloids as a victim of that era’s cultural misogyny. For a while she seemed to exist not as an actress but as a curio — remember Lindsay Lohan's Beach Club, anyone? — only to tiptoe her way back to respectability by way of corny Netflix Christmas movies.

And yet Freakier Friday, directed by Nisha Ganatra, has defied the odds. It’s charming and genuinely sweet, and it made me both giggle and tear up. That alone is a win.