Bodies Bodies Bodies (

2023

)

I am in the window now, where I'm old enough that I have no idea how kids talk anymore and too young to have any teenage children around to explain the slang to me. It's likely that I am the most gullible person in America on the subject and will cheerfully be willing to accept even the most absurd idioms and ridiculous terms as genuine youth dialogue. Yet, even I think the dialogue in Bodies Bodies Bodies is atrocious. It's so bad I feel like I should take secondhand offense on behalf of all those youngsters I don't talk to or associate with. The kids in this movie don't talk like kids, they talk like middle-aged women on Twitter.

Of course, capturing genuine youth dialogue is a difficult challenge for all the old fogies making movies. At best of times it becomes something surreal like A Clockwork Orange (1971) where the slang takes on a faux-Shakespearean ridiculousness but most of the time it feels hopelessly phony and out-of-touch like the script of Wish Upon (2017). Bodies Bodies Bodies is worse than fake sounding though, it's cringe.

Our story revolves around a group of 20-something jet-setters hanging out at an improbably remote mansion. The host of the party is David, a weird-looking scion of some incredibly wealthy family. In attendance are his “actress” girlfriend Emma, Alice who passes her time by running a podcast, Alice's much older boy-toy Greg, and Jordan who is not really characterized in any way but we're later told that she is the type of person who likes to schedule sex in her Google calendar. Crashing the party uninvited and unannounced are Sophie, a recovering drug addict and former friend of the group, and her working-class girlfriend Bee. Except for Bee and Greg, The kids are all the typical sort of rich kids you see in satirical Hollywood movies made by rich people about how much rich people suck. Which is to say they are soulless and annoying. Only David has an interesting glimmer of a character. When Sophie explains to him that she came back to the group because she missed him he scoffs and says “We both know that’s a lie. Nobody has ever missed me.” It's not much, but this moment of, possibly affected, humility gives the audience some glimpse into his character. Too bad we can't say the same for any of the other people cluttering up this film.

The kids amuse themselves with copious drugs and alcohol and a Mafia-style game called “Bodies Bodies Bodies” for a while until they discover David with his throat slashed. This kicks off a wave of paranoia as the group becomes convinced the killer is among them and has to be rooted out. Under normal circumstances, you would expect them to phone the cops, but for some reason, David's gazillionaire parents decided to build their palatial estate somewhere in the 5% of the country that has no cellphone reception. To make matters worse, the kids can't drive into town to get help either, because none of them has a car, aside from Sophie and her battery has run dry because Bee left the lights on. This is pretty hard to swallow, as pointedly not owning cars is only a trait of the urban super-rich. Surly David's father has a couple of Maseratis in the garage he keeps around as status symbols even if he never drives them.

The power is also out, which presents more of a problem for the audience than the characters, as the filmmakers are going to insist on mostly naturalistic lighting which means we won't be able to see anything half the time. Be prepared to spend the bulk of the film staring at inscrutable darkness trying to interpret what is going on from a few blurry images. It's not often I say this, but this film might have worked better as a radio drama. Since all the characters sound exactly the same except for Greg and Bee, this problem is doubly compounded. Don't worry though, the film has given Alice of all characters a glow-stick necklace that will help to identify her, and only her, in every scene. How considerate.

In any event, people keep dying, either by being killed by the paranoid rich kids or through unfortunate accidents until only Bee, Alice, Sophie, and Jordan are left. The group decides that Bee must be the killer because she is the only one that they haven't met before. So rather than killing her or locking her in a room, they force her outside into the rain. I don't know about you guys, but if I was convinced someone was a murderer and I lacked the ability to deal with them or turn them over to the police, giving them the old “out of sight out of mind” treatment would probably be the last thing I would consider. Indeed, Bee quickly sneaks back into the house and confronts the surviving trio of rich bitches. Good thing she's not actually a murderer otherwise they'd all be toast.

Unfortunately, since Bee isn't a killer we in the audience are instead subjected to a confrontation between the four survivors that constitutes the absolute nadir of the film's cringe dialogue. We get such clunking lines as “I understand, and I am an ally and I totally get how it looks that way” and “You fucking trigger me” and “Don't call her a psychopath. That's so ableist.” Though honestly, the worst has got the be the exchange between Jordan and Sophie: “Feelings are facts” “No, they're not. Facts are facts.” I don't think I've ever seen a script poisoned by social media this badly before. Getting banned from Twitter would be the best thing that could happen to this screenwriter. 

Now, a film about a bunch of annoying kids being butchered while trapped in a secluded mansion could be enjoyable. Indeed, I'm sure I just described a few dozen middling slashers from the early 80s. The problem is that there is no satisfaction in the homicides in Bodies Bodies Bodies. It's fun to watch Jason Voorhees disembowel a parade of hair-brained camp counselors in increasingly ridiculous ways. It is not fun to watch the kids kill each other in mundane ways when the screen and setting are so dark that I can't tell what is happening. There are several hundred slashers that could serve as a model for how to make this film enjoyable, and it's downright baffling to screw up cinematic ground that is this well tread.

The climatic twist that David was not murdered and that he instead slashed his own throat while filming a TikTok is an amusing ending to an otherwise tedious film. It's funny to think that everything that has happened in the rest of the film has happened because of a misunderstanding. That all these rich morons spent the evening butchering each other for no reason and that the real killer was their idiocy all along. However, one good chuckle at the absurdity of life is not really worth the hour and a half of annoying ugliness that preceded it.

Bodies Bodies Bodies is part of a cinematic sub-genre that I simply don't understand. Like Knives Out (2019) and The Menu (2022) before it, it is a movie about annoying rich people made by annoying rich people for an audience of annoying rich people. If you have ever had to work for a living you will probably be slightly confused by the whole concept. Can we go back to having a wealthy elite that sees themselves as superior to regular people, and thus has to guide them through a mixture of ego and noblesse oblige? It was certainly preferable to this current crop of self-loathing oligarchs who can only wallow in their own stupidity and indolence.

I probably would have opted to ignore the film entirely, but after I was done watching a few Google searches turned up a controversy that is funnier than any of the satire in the movie. It started when Lena Wilson at the New York Times wrote a substance-less and mostly negative review of the film. Now, it is entirely possible that Ms. Wilson did not watch the movie at all, because she describes the movie as “visually appealing” an absurd stance since as mentioned above the majority of the movie is mostly black screens and blurry action. Though, what can you expect from a film critic who was only hired because her dad was an editor?

However, the part of her review that sparked controversy was a line where she describes the movie as “a 95-minute advertisement for cleavage.” Now my issue with this statement is that it is both nonsensical (cleavage is not some niche interest that needs to be advertised but rather something with appeal so broad that it is frequently used to advertise other products) and slightly depressing. Bodies Bodies Bodies is not a sexy horror movie by any standards. Sure, it may start with a protracted, fetishized, lesbian kiss, but this is a genre that in earlier times included gratuitous nudity almost as a requirement. Compare the Bacchanalia or even a mainstream 80s slasher movie like Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) to this film and you will see just how far we've fallen in terms of cinematic cheesecake. It's a little distressing to think that anyone who writes film reviews for a living could describe this film as scintillating with a straight face.

However, the controversy really kicked off when the film's star Amandla Stenberg sent a snotty DM on Instagram saying “Ur (sic) review was great, maybe if you had gotten ur (sic) eyes off my tits you could’ve watched the movie” presumably in reference to the aforementioned cleavage line. Which is funny for a variety of reasons. For one thing, a shitty film with some sexy girls in it is infinitely preferable to a shitty film without any sexy girls. Being distracted by cleavage while watching a film like Bodies Bodies Bodies could only possibly improve your assessment of the film. Wilson's review also never mentions whose cleavage she's referring to, and Ms. Stenberg is far from the only actress showing some skin. However, I expect actresses to be self-involved, so it doesn't surprise me that Stenberg assumed it was her. What I would expect is for an actress who is ostensibly an adult, to refrain from sending messages to writers who penned negative reviews of their movies. It's bratty behavior but then again there are plenty of brats in Hollywood of all ages.

Wilson responded as all young women in entertainment do in the current age, and immediately presented herself as the victim of harassment on social media. “I don’t want this person who has more social power than me to think that it’s fucking okay to do something like this” she proclaims, somehow ignorant of the fact that social power does not count for much in a private conversation unless you make the conversation public... Which is exactly what Wilson is doing with her TikTok video about it. Amusingly, she tried to paint Stenberg as some kind of misogynist (Stenberg is a woman) and homophobe (Stenberg is not straight).

Stenberg responded with a short video of her own claiming that she meant the message as a playful joke and also that she is very sensitive about comments made about her tits because “The amount of commentary I receive on my boobs is so extreme...This has happened since I was a teenager.” So, at once she is saying that this was no big deal and she's just kidding around but actually, this is super serious and a topic about which she has some legitimate trauma. These two statements cannot possibly be true at the same time, either Stenberg is upset with Wilson for the cleavage comment or she isn't. To make her stance even more ambiguous, Stenberg notes “You are allowed to have your criticism of my work and I'm allowed to have my criticisms of your work. I wish you the best.” So is she criticizing Wilson's review or playfully joking with her? I have no clue and at this point, and I don't think Stenberg does either.

Now this is comedy! We have two extremely privileged people, each from a modern-day protected group, sizing each other up and trying to paint themselves as the more aggrieved and vulnerable. 'I won't let a person with more social power do this to me' says the writer for the world's premiere newspaper who got her job because of family connections. 'I know she's talking about my tits... People are always talking about my tits.' Responds the actress with no awareness of how incredibly vain she sounds. 'Anyway, I'm just kidding around, but this is a very serious and traumatic subject for me so you need to be sensitive.' She adds as if trying to set a world record for contradictions.

This is why modern-day satires like Bodies Bodies Bodies have such a hard time landing effectively. The world we live in is so absurd and so silly that all attempts to parody it are done in vain.