Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hour, 35 minutes
Director: Halina Reijn
Quick Impressions:
My seven-year-old has recently agreed to watch movies with us. The catch is, he will only watch horror movies. His sister and I tried desperately to get him to watch just about everything on Disney +. He refused. (He does like the Fantasia movies, but he wasn’t in the mood.) At great length and after much cajoling, he did agree to watch something—The Blair Witch Project. Then his brother came for the weekend, and he enthusiastically agreed to watch Paranormal Activity. After that, we watched forty minutes of trailers, and he discovered the #1 movie he is most excited to see.
You guessed it. Bodies Bodies Bodies.
“It looks like Among Us,” he decided.
(“He’s not wrong,” my husband said.
“Well, no,” I agreed, “and to be honest, I’m pretty sure he would like it, but I’m not taking a seven-year-old to an R-rated horror movie.”
Neither of us has the nerve to do that. I’m already worried sick about 1) Everybody thinking I’m a bad mother. 2) Actually being a bad mother. (#2 is the more pressing concern.) I can’t exactly explain to other theater goers, “My son is very eccentric.” He does constantly walk around saying, “I’m not like the other boys!” but that’s to make his sister laugh.)
As my husband and I headed out to see Bodies Bodies Bodies (alone, for our date night), my husband observed, “You know, I never liked horror movies much before, but for some reason I’m really into them lately.” Pausing thoughtfully, he realized, “Probably because our son will watch them, so we actually get to watch something.” (It’s very unusual for him to agree to watch any scripted programming. He will sometimes watch Jeopardy!, but that was his limit until he discovered horror. He even watched It the other night! That one was too scary for me! We had a blanket he could hide under, but I was the one who wanted to hide! Those townspeople are so unpleasant!)
Bodies Bodies Bodies is much more to my liking. Despite the characters’ glaring flaws, they’re all pretty likeable (especially if the supporting characters in It are your standard). Plus because of its ending, Bodies Bodies Bodies is stronger than I initially realized.
The Good:
Bodies Bodies Bodies is sort of like that classic Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” but updated slightly for the present moment with more glow necklaces and cocaine. Also, Pete Davidson is there.
It is definitely a movie of the moment. Thanks to the pandemic, we’ve all been in the house a little too long recently. A hurricane party is a lot like quarantine. The characters in this movie are like all of us. They’re all locked up together. It makes them a little paranoid. Something bad is coming, so they all turn on each other, full of recriminations. They’ve been forced to do a lot of self-work and confront their inner demons, and now they’re desperate to point fingers in blame at the other demons all around them. This film basically holds up a mirror to society right now, and it’s hard to deny that we look a bit messed up.
If you’re an adult like me, thinking, “I miss going to parties,” this movie will knock that stupid idea right out of your head. (Actually, I’m really glad I don’t have to go to parties anymore, but I do love glow necklaces.) We live in Texas, but I’ve never been to a hurricane party, and I find the idea a little perplexing. (I kept thinking, “What would the characters in Key Largo think of this party?”) Only one person at the party seems at all concerned by the reality of the storm.
The movie is a lot more pleasant to watch than something like It (which is a very good horror movie, to be clear) because attractive people are always making out and swimming and fighting and eating cake. It looks like a great party, honestly, except I’d get rid of those guests and sub in my family.
In a relatively early scene of the movie, I gasped to my husband, “I want to play Bodies Bodies Bodies!” (My son was right. The game-within-the-movie essentially is live-action Among Us (which our family plays in a local game all the time). I know my kids would love playing that game. Our problem is that there are usually only three of us playing. Once the first person dies, it’s not too hard to figure out who the murderer is. I also worry that if we turned out all the lights like that, one of us would fall down the stairs to our grisly death. (Ever since I read about David Niven’s first wife, I’ve been so wary of our staircase.)
Along with its obvious similarities to Among Us, the movie also reminds me of a weird game some of the YouTubers my kids watch were playing a while ago. (I think it was Love Island: The Game. I know Gloom was playing, maybe also LaurenzSide. I remember Gloom trying to make the worst decisions she could at one point.) There’s kind of a reality TV vibe to Bodies Bodies Bodies. (It reminds me a bit of that old show The 5th Wheel. It also reminds me of fifth grade, when my friend and I would create bizarre scenarios with our Barbies, pretending we could control the behavior of people we knew.) Anybody might be hooking up! Somebody for sure is going to die! The world we get a glimpse of doesn’t feel quite like actual reality. (For one thing, based on what we hear, the person having the least sex is Pete Davidson. That can’t be right!)
So it’s a fun movie, but as it goes on, it becomes truly suspenseful, much harder to figure out than I expected. I remember thinking, “I actually don’t know who did this,” and, “I don’t see how anyone could be the killer because of the way we keep seeing stuff happen. Instead of getting clues, we’re just getting increasingly confusing situations.” The film does a surprisingly good job building and sustaining suspense and keeping us guessing right to the end. Afterwards, my husband and I agreed that there was only one character we didn’t suspect. (It’s probably just because that person starts to be used as comic relief. Also, she just seems very innocent (of murder, I mean, like Mr. Green in Clue).
Within the world of the story, the characters are kind of horrible, but they’re also kind of nice. They seem like people who would be fun to hang out with, but only if they were already your friends, which would never be the case for me. In situations like this, I’m always in the Maria Bakalova role wandering around like Alice in Wonderland, terror eating an amount of chocolate cake that would be inadvisable even if there weren’t weed in it.
I watched the whole movie trying to place Maria Bakalova. I cannot believe I didn’t recognize her! (The only star I knew going in was Pete Davidson because he sticks out like a sore thumb in the trailer. (It’s almost comical. You think, “Hey look! It’s a bunch of teenagers and Pete Davidson!”) (They’re more like twenty-somethings, actually.) I didn’t recognize Lee Pace, either. I saw his name in the end credits and croaked in shock, “That was Lee Pace!?” Honestly, I didn’t recognize anybody! (“That was the little girl from The Hunger Games? What?”) (I can’t believe that was Amandla Stenberg. I remember her very clearly because she got some Oscar buzz from The Hate U Give.) I must have been very out of it when I agreed to go to this movie. I’m surprised I recognized my husband!
Initially, the people at this party all seemed extremely unpleasant to me. Strangely after we spend some time with them and see all of their most horrendous behavior, I liked them all better. They’re all so miserable. I felt terribly bad for Jordan (Myha’la Herrold), and I also think it’s ridiculously sad that Emma (Chase Sui Wonders) is never believed to have any genuine emotions just because she’s an actress.
For the type of movie that it is, the performances are much better than I expected. (To be honest, I went in expecting a gimmicky slasher flick, but the movie makes some pretty solid commentary about society at the moment in a reasonably entertaining way. And it’s short, just 95 minutes.) It’s a stronger movie than I thought I’d be getting. Pete Davidson is an early highlight, but the whole cast is quite solid, very watchable.
I didn’t expect much from the story or screenplay. (In August, Pete Davidson, glow necklaces, ninety-five minutes, and murder will sell me a ticket.) But writers Sarah DeLappe and Kristen Roupenian pleasantly surprised me. The plot is not needlessly elaborate. The sustained suspense is unusually well done (especially because the movie is also funny, sort of satirical.) I was never completely sure that I could trust anyone, and this was accomplished by smart writing (and strategic cinematography. I’ll get to that in a minute). The right information is withheld from us at the right times. It’s also fairly novel (given the premise) and eerily true to life that while no information seems trustworthy to the audience, almost all of the characters believe what they are saying to be true almost all of the time. (That’s the way interactions on social media work, too. Everybody believes what they’re saying, except for the trolls who are just messing with you (like Pete Davidson) or the people who believe others are just messing with them (like what’s-his-name that guy I’ve apparently never seen before I guess). (I still can’t believe that was Lee Pace!) This is a simple premise executed well.
The cinematography helps keep us in suspense. Most of the deaths happen right before our eyes, yet it’s still almost impossible to tell what’s going on. This lets the audience experience the events as the characters would. If we were in the situation ourselves (trapped, high, and increasingly panicked), this is how we would see the murders. Cinematographer Jasper Wolf also did the acclaimed Monos, and some scenes in this film look so compelling (and not just because I love glow necklaces). Sometimes the shot composition surprised me, and I didn’t expect so much non-verbal story building.
I guess I just really underestimated the movie! (That’s my review in a nutshell. “The acting was good! I didn’t expect it to be good! The writing was good! I didn’t expect it to be good! The cinematography was good! I didn’t expect it to be good!”) (I can’t remember the score at all, but based on my track record here, I’d guess it was unexpectedly good.)
Best Scene Visually:
When Bee crawls in through the doggy door, I felt an unsettling surge of claustrophobia and initially worried that she was making a horrible mistake. (We also get some significant visual storytelling just before this sequence.) I also am a huge fan of the way each murder is shown to us, so that it’s often impossible to be sure where the lethal actions originate, even while we are directly watching a death occur.
Best Scene:
I love the scene when everyone starts to confess and share their various issues and struggles. This is the scene when I began to realize that I love Alice (Rachel Sennott). (For quite some time, I’d been thinking, “Do I like Alice the best?”) She’s very funny.
As my husband noted, what’s best about this scene is that although the characters are all attacking each other, every one of them does, in fact, have real issues, and they all deserve support and sympathy. Instead of mutually supporting each other, however, they literally start to attack each other. This is a very toxic friend group.
Best Action Sequence:
I love how every time another death happens, we get theories and accusations from all the characters, every one of them completely sure that she’s figured out what’s going on. (This film would be great for classroom use. If I were still teaching rhetoric, you can bet I’d use it.)
The moment when everyone confronts someone wearing a sleep mask is intense and well-acted, too.
The Negatives:
Now that I’ve seen the entire movie, I would watch it again anytime. But on a first watch, there were moments when I thought, “Okay, it’s a dragging a little here.” The movie is very short, but not all scenes are equally engaging on a first viewing, and the film does lose a lot of sparkle when Pete Davidson is not in it. (He’s very charismatic.) I was disappointed (though not surprised) to see Davidson go, and I missed him. There are some scenes that feel heavy with clichés, like when everybody realizes in alarm that they don’t have cell reception. That “joke” felt a little tired, to me. Gen Z is glued to their cell phones? Entitled new adult children of wealthy parents experience life through their phones? The point felt as overused and tired as the behavior it was calling out. (I mean, what I’ve observed even more than Zoomers being attached to their phones and living through social media is lazy media outlets unimaginatively calling that out.) (My son loves to tell his sister, “Okay Zoomer!” He’s very proud of being Gen Alpha.)
But some of this stuff feels less lazy in retrospect now that I’ve seen the conclusion of the movie and discovered that it’s making a cohesive point, not just including random, lazy scenes to pander to a slasher-flick-loving audience.
I wish we knew a bit more about Sophie. Her relationship with Bee remains somewhat mysterious to me. I realize that’s done to maximize suspense, to ensure that we can’t completely trust anyone. But even though I largely understand her motives (and like the fairly clever way we learn more about her motivations), I still don’t really know exactly why she brought Bee to the party.
In more minor concerns, I’m not used to hearing that someone “has borderline.” I suppose it’s less dehumanizing than saying someone “is borderline.” (I’ve always heard not to say, “I’m bipolar,” but I find, “I have bipolar disorder” to be clunky and inelegant. I always say, “I’m bipolar,” because it sounds better. I’m not reducing my identity to my mental illness, just going for brevity.) Saying someone “has borderline” is kinder and more accurate than “is borderline,” and it’s less wordy than “has borderline personality disorder.” But I still don’t like it.
I have a rather strong reaction to the phrase, “She has borderline,” probably because I don’t like, “She has bipolar,” (and I’ve got more skin in the game there). But maybe leaving out all clunky excess verbiage is for the best. I always recoil a bit at phrasing like this, but maybe I just need to get used to it. Nobody says, “I am depression,” or “I am cancer.” I especially don’t like to hear “my bipolar,” and “my borderline” gives me the same feeling. When I first started taking medication, I could not stand it when people said, “my meds,” with casual cheerfulness as if they were participating in a trendy fad diet, but I got over that a long time ago. I guess I’ll just have to get over this.
I do think the scene in which “has borderline” is used runs the risk of encouraging audience members not to take mental illness seriously, simply because the characters are made to look so ridiculous and self-indulgent as they discuss their mental illnesses. They have absolutely no compassion for one another (or themselves, honestly). The scene is funny and makes a true point, but movie audiences can be staggeringly great at misunderstanding things and getting the wrong point. Although I love the scene where these things are discussed, I do have concerns that it may lead some audience members to mock people struggling with mental illness or to sink into self-loathing regarding their own problems.
Overall:
Bodies Bodies Bodies is a much better movie than I expected or required. I enjoyed the experience. It’s a brief, fun watch, and it carefully makes a serious point about what can happen to us as a society when we become isolated, overwrought, and hysterical. I would happily watch it again anytime.