Review: Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)

Rated R

Score: 4 out of 5

Bodies Bodies Bodies is a movie that, at first glance, wears the skin of a whodunit slasher mystery in the vein of Scream with a dash of more modern inspiration from Among Us thrown in, but as it goes on, what it’s actually doing becomes increasingly apparent. While its satire of circa-2022 youth culture is obvious at first glance, by the end it’s clear that this is the kind of Scream movie that the Coen Brothers might have made if they ever decided to take a crack at the franchise, a pitch-black comedy about a bunch of jumpy, paranoid assholes whose deaths are all caused by their own failings, and not just in the manner of “dumb teens who run up the stairs when they should be going out the front door”. (It’s insulting.) It’s a movie about people who pretend to be nice to one another until the bodies start dropping, at which point they use every weapon they can get their hands on, both physical and psychological, to tear each other apart even despite the looming danger. And when the finale puts a nice little bow on everything and ends the movie on the kind of gigantic “well, that happened” note that drove home everything I just said, I was left smiling from ear to ear.

Make no mistake, this movie isn’t for everyone. The A24 logo that opens the film should let you know that. It is deeply mean-spirited, the ending in question can feel like a cheat if you’re expecting the typical resolution to a slasher movie, and it bears repeating, the main characters are assholes. Director Halina Reijn and writer Sarah DeLappe made this movie to piss people off. But it’s got a great cast, a ton of style, and sharp writing that cuts deep, largely due to those very same qualities. If you know what you’re in for, then this movie is a blast.

The film takes place in a mansion deep in the woods, where a group of twentysomething friends are having a hurricane party as a tropical storm bears down on them. Our main characters are the lesbian couple Sophie and Bee, the latter coming from a working-class immigrant background as opposed to the wealthy Sophie and her similarly rich friends and thus providing viewers with their viewpoint character/neatly-telegraphed final girl. The mansion is owned by the family of the rich hypebeast David, who has invited his childhood friend Sophie, his actress girlfriend Emma, the podcaster Alice, Alice’s boyfriend Greg, the enigmatic Jordan, and Max (who left after getting into a fight with David) to spend the night. As the storm rages outside and the power goes out, the group decides to play Bodies Bodies Bodies, a party game similar to Among Us in which one player is the killer and has to “off” the rest of the group. Things go horribly wrong when David is found dead for real with a slashed throat and his sweet kukri lying nearby stained with his blood, indicating that one of them has taken the game a little too seriously – that, or they decided to use the opportunity to let their “friends” know what they really thought of them. With all evidence pointing to murder and no help on the way until morning, the group suspects a killer in their midst, and before long, erupts into a paranoid maelstrom of accusations that end in more blood.

You should know what you’re in for from the moment you see Pete Davidson as David, playing to his real-life public persona when he says that the vibe he likes to give off is that he fucks. This is a slasher movie in which everyone is the asshole, a very deliberate move on the film’s part given the message that it’s trying to send. The real meat of the film isn’t the murders, it’s how the characters react to them, and their reactions are informed by the fact that they are representative of everything that Reijn and DeLappe see as rotten in the culture of the Kids These Days. They are neurotic and distrustful, seeing all of their supposed friends as being out to get them the moment they face a serious challenge and reacting accordingly. They hide their catty backstabbing behind progressive-sounding language and weaponize their tragic pasts and personal traumas to try to claim the moral high ground and get under each other’s skin. They are the Plastics from Mean Girls reimagined for 2022, and make no mistake, this movie is not nice or sympathetic. It has a mean streak a mile wide, made most apparent in the ending where it becomes clear just how all of this violence could have been avoided had everybody not jumped to conclusions and assumed the worst about each other.

And its best trick is in how it does all that without feeling preachy on one hand or hollow on the other. You can agree or disagree with this film’s message about youth culture (I’m personally split), but it’s hard to deny that it has guts, it feels more pointed than simple “get off my lawn” rambling in what it’s actually aiming to say, it hits more than one of its targets, it does not back down from it, and most importantly, it serves and elevates the story and the film as a whole. I can very easily imagine how a lesser version of this movie’s writing, made by somebody less interested in crafting a compelling satirical story than in grinding a political/cultural axe against everybody under the age of 30, could’ve easily turned insufferable, and the manner in which this film avoided those pitfalls not only made it enjoyably twisted instead, it sharpened the film’s edge as well. These characters may all be gigantic assholes, but they felt like the kinds of assholes you encounter in real life, their bad decisions flowing logically from how they see the world, and not cardboard cutouts who serve as hollow strawman depictions of 2020s youth culture to get hacked up by a maniac. While the film never gets directly political, I can see a lot of folks of a “live and let live” libertarian bent, people who think that that modern progressivism and youth culture have become too uptight, moralistic, and (ironically) socially conservative but won’t bat an eye at having a queer romance at the center of the story, finding this film in the coming years the same way they did with the show Firefly back in the ‘00s. (Hell, Sonny Bunch has already named this one of his favorite movies of the year.)

It helps that Reijn and cinematographer Jasper Wolf shoot the shit out of this movie. The mansion, besieged by a hurricane with the power out, feels claustrophobic, with danger potentially lurking around every corner and in every shadow. Since everybody's acting shifty and distrustful, you don't feel safe even when somebody you think you can trust is in the room with you, because can you trust them? Amandla Stenberg and Maria Bakalova do a great job playing Sophie and Bee, their relationship starting with the passionate make-out session that opens the film but slowly falling apart the longer the film goes on and the more their secrets spill out, the tension they share slowly growing until it becomes clear that, even if they both survive, nothing is going to be the same between them. The real standout, however, is Rachel Sennott as Alice. In a sea of bitches, Alice is the alpha bitch, a blabbermouthed, histrionic ditz who is the last person in the building to grasp the seriousness of the situation and instead keeps trying to make everything about herself. She was one of the funniest things in this film as her hopelessly skewed priorities cause her to constantly get herself and everybody else in trouble, and I fully expect Sennott to be this film's breakout star going forward.

If I had a serious, substantial complaint about this film, it's that, while it is very moody, it wasn't very scary. Without getting into spoilers, I understand why this movie leaned more on atmosphere instead of visceral thrills, but at the same time, a few moments that really ramped up the terror would have gone a long way towards putting me as a viewer into the same frame of mind that Sophie and Bee were in. Instead of being an outside observer to the scares, I would've liked to be as terrified as the main characters were, as doing so could have made the big reveal into a serious gut-punch instead of a "...huh". Learning what was really going on could've really stung if I'd felt like I were in Sophie or Bee's shoes, the latter especially given not only her framing as both an outsider and the "final girl" but also the fact that she's strongly hinted to not be quite as heroic and "above it all" as she seems. Really dragging the viewers into the muck would've caused the reveal to turn the mirror on them, telling them "oh, you think you're better than these obnoxious little brats, don't you?" It felt like a missed opportunity to land one last shattering uppercut to send viewers home wondering if they would've done anything differently from the awful people here.

The Bottom Line

Bodies Bodies Bodies is a hilarious slasher satire that's not perfect, and may feel like a bit of a cheat if you don't know what you're getting into, but certainly hits the mark if you do. It's a sendup of youth culture that's vicious and mean-spirited without being ignorant and bitter, and it's one I'd love to rewatch.