Bodies Bodies Bodies review: A take on Scream for the Zoomer generation

“They’re not as nihilistic as they look on the internet,” Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) tells her new girlfriend, Bee (Maria Bakalova), in A24’s horror film Bodies Bodies Bodies, as they move to join Sophie’s friends at a gathering. Sophie and Bee are six weeks into their relationship, and headed to a house party at the family mansion of Sophie’s best friend, David (Pete Davidson). They’re planning to ride out an approaching hurricane, but Sophie’s mysterious whims are an equal disaster: It turns out that her “not as nihilistic as they look” friend group isn’t even expecting her to show up, much less arrive with a partner they don’t know. Given how rapidly the getaway devolves into bloody mayhem, it’s a bad time to be the new girl in the crowd.

Bodies Bodies Bodies isn’t an especially internet-driven movie; the hurricane quickly kills the power in David’s house, and the cell service and Wi-Fi go down with it. Most contentious disagreements focus on semi-private insults and not publicly-facing tweets. But Sophie’s opening attempt to soften her friends’ abrasiveness lingers for the audience as the night goes spectacularly wrong. It’s true that these people don’t seem especially nihilistic. At the same time, they’re all surprisingly willing to suspect each other of murder.

Bodies Bodies BodiesIt begins as a social anxiety dramedy. Shiva Baby, the symphony of discomfort starring Rachel Sennott, who also appears here, stealing scenes as Sophie’s friend Alice. The movie also introduces Emma (Chase Sui Wonders), who is dating David; Jordan (Myha’la Herrold), who looks askance at nearly everyone; and Greg (Lee Pace), an older guy Alice has been with for an even briefer window than Sophie and Bee have been together. Greg and the other characters are in a somewhat ambiguous age group. Given their reckless substance abuse and carelessness with each other, they’re somewhere between still young and too old.

Four of the women of Bodies Bodies Bodies gather around a candle in the dark

Watching them snipe at each other, it’s striking to think about how canned and overly scrubbed most horror-movie friend groups are by comparison. Bodies Bodies Bodies does eventually emerge as horror; it even kicks off with a parlor game, a gimmick as flashy as anything in a second-tier Blumhouse title, though director Halina Reijn and screenwriter Sarah DeLappe (working from a story by “Cat Person” author Kristen Roupenian) don’t show much interest in sticking to this framework. When the power is cut, friends are unable to find a killer and instead become terrified of finding one. (There’s a bit of meta-suspense over which semi-celebrity performer will be the surprise first victim.)

You can find more information here Bodies Bodies BodiesIt starts to feel compressed Spit, sped up as if the filmmakers believe they’re playing to a generation that can’t keep both eyes on a full-length feature film. Filmmakers make the difficult choice of increasing both bloodshed and absurdity simultaneously. Instead of allowing satire to give way horror-movie tension they increase the volume and absurdity of the defensiveness and recriminations as characters are more threatened. At one point, mortal peril is interrupted by the equally shocking betrayal that one friend may be hate-listening to another’s podcast.

It seems possible, though, that the movie freely switches between the satirical edge and the knife’s edge because it doesn’t ultimately have a lot to say in either mode. Sometimes, it’s a relief that Bodies doesn’t appear to have some encompassing metaphor up its sleeve. In one scene, the characters spout a dizzying array of buzzwords at each other in their fear and rage, as if furiously rebuking David’s initial complaint that the word “gaslighting” has lost all meaning. (The movie doesn’t turn social media into a hook, but its language is pretty online.)

Although all of the actors were solid, Sennott was particularly hilarious as Alice. Alice takes each horror-movie turn as an attack on her. Ultimately, the movie is more mischievous thought experiment than an attack on Zoomers; it essentially asks, “What if people who were hyper-aware of their own triggers and traumas had to react to a ghoulish turn of horror-movie events?”

Two of the characters of Bodies Bodies Bodies peer nervously over a bannister, lit from below

But the horror aspect doesn’t quite hold up as the film progresses. Reijn’s glowsticks-and-flashlights lighting aesthetic is neat at first, but the sheer volume of shaky-cam, close-ups, and streaks of harsh lighting eventually bring to mind found-footage horror, without the unnerving sense of reality provided by that subgenre’s better entries. It’s also, for a movie called Bodies Bodies BodiesIt is surprising that young people are not at all sceptical about the ways they abuse and manipulate their bodies and what this might mean for their responses to danger.

The creators’ understandable but tamer instinct is instead to playClueWith the characters. Bee is one of the most interesting characters in this movie. This allows for some mystery to be preserved, even though there are many suspects. In spite of the camera’s closeness, this is a horror movie at arm’s length; Reijn and DeLappe don’t seem interested in preying on real fears so much as laughingly confirming any suspicions that yes, your friends secretly talk smack about you. Bodies Bodies Bodies is a fun ride through those well-founded anxieties, but as the end credits roll, some viewers may still be waiting for more of a punch — or a better punchline.

Bodies Bodies BodiesIt opens on Aug. 5 in a limited theatrical release, with nationwide distribution following on Aug. 12.