Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)
Let’s get this comic horrorfest started — the game cast of Bodies Bodies Bodies
I’ve seen this movie called a horror show, a slasher flick, and that old standby, the single location murder mystery. To me it seemed a bit of all three. If you need to label it, knock yourself out, for I predict you will be knocked out. It’s fun and spooky, and it spins multiple twists.
It begins at an isolated mansion, the family manse of David (Pete Davidson, whose rubbery grin and menacing pop eyes will be familiar from SNL). He’s a moody rich layabout so unrelievedly fueled by drink and drugs that everyone mostly takes his nastiness in stride.
He’s gathered his girlfriend Emma (Chase Sui Wonders) and other affluent Gen Z friends for a “hurricane party” – indeed, a powerful rainstorm is on the way – and everyone’s up for staying indoors and getting zonked. Booze, pills and lines of coke are abundantly on offer.
A podcaster named Alice (Rachel Sennott) has brought along the hunky older Greg (Lee Pace), and his slightly baffled takes on the younger generation help keep the audience clued in. All the partygoers quake a bit at the quiet, scarily observant Jordan (Myha’la Herrold). And suddenly Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) turns up with her new girlfriend Bee (Maria Bakalova), who’s meeting the group for the first time.
Tensions slowly emerge. Sophie didn’t text to inform the group she and Bee were coming, so everyone’s a bit teed. David is out of sorts after an argument with his housemate Max, who’s left in a huff. Alice is scraping everyone’s nerves with her hyper-glee.
Jordan, without explaining why, advises Bee to “be careful” around Sophie. But could the too-nervous Bee also be hiding something? David and Greg start to out-macho one another, nearly coming to blows.
The torrential rain, the thunder and the lightning spook everybody. Abused substances begin to abuse back. Sarcasm becomes cruelly personal.
Everyone decides to chill out by playing a darkened-house game, “Bodies, Bodies, Bodies”. With the lights out, someone pretends to kill someone else, and that person falls “dead”. The other players wander through the house, and anyone who comes across a “corpse” must yell bodies bodies bodies. David, a poor sport, dislikes the way the game is being played and storms off.
The fun and games suddenly turn to life and death. Outside, on a rain-soaked patio, David is found dead, his throat slashed. Lightning strikes again, and all the mansion’s lights go out. The group is now left with only flashlights and cell phones for illumination, and everyone’s brought up short: Which of them is the murderer? (There’s no sign of Max.)
Bee, Sophie, Jordan and Alice make a grim discovery in Bodies Bodies Bodies
Other bodies begin to turn up, whether actually dead, in shock, or only pretending to be comatose, isn’t always immediately clear, to us or to the partiers. And when they lose wi-fi connectivity, they have only each other to rely on.
Now they can’t telephone for help, speak to or text the police, or summon anyone from a nearby (how far?) house. Trapped, everyone starts raving to prove their “innocence”.
That’s the key to the satire here. No one’s word can quite be trusted, because what links these characters is, paradoxically, what also keeps them apart, the ways they’ve continually preened to the world and to each other online. Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitter and texting have been their go-to resources for what’s true, or for what they hope can be believed, about them.
Thrust into the dark, with blood spilling, they angrily confront each other as if for the first time, which in a way this is. With no screens to look at, their faces in shadow, they’re forced to look inward, and they don’t like what they see.
The zinger of an ending gives the night’s mystery an odd, comfortless “explanation”. It took me totally by surprise, yet it made clear that none of the night’s revelers were guiltless.
Director Halina Reijn is remarkably adroit in helping her actors focus on rapidly shifting moods. Pleas for help and brutal emotional attacks erupt from moment to moment. She also deploys the camera as both investigator and judge of character. Closeups neatly capture a character’s false front precisely as it collapses. The fake and the real both get their moment. We aren’t immediately sure which is which.
Reijn and cinematographer Jasper Wolf bring a biting clarity to scenes in low light, which is nearly all of them. I kept wondering as I grasped the action unfolding in ostensible darkness: How’d they do that?
Scenes apparently lit only by flashlights and cell phones amped up the fright and cast doubt on everyone’s motives. It was only afterwards I realized that a lot of the scariness was in my own head, put there not by shocks but by what the moviemakers refused to show me.
Of course, isn’t that how all horror movies rope us in? We imagine more than we see. But here it’s not just the identity of the killer we want to learn. Who are these snotty, drifting people, anyway? If their sniping Gen Z shallowness is becoming the norm, laughable as it can often be, is our society slowly beginning to sink?
But that’s taking matters far too seriously. These callow hedonists are still hoping for genuine connections. The movie’s last line suggests they’ll have a hard time finding them. Do we wish these young pleasure-seekers the best, or no matter which generation we belong to, are we quietly glad we don’t know them?
I might have to overcome my general aversion to horror movies and go see this one. The question that makes me pause, though, is that I've read a lot of people who say the movie is "a look at what Gen Z is like" or something along those lines. Is this really true? Were the filmmakers attempting to create a workable, reasonable characterization of a whole generation? Or were they writing individual characters? I really don't know. It seems as though Gen Z gets stereotyped by the older generations to an inordinate degree. But I haven't yet heard any reviewer talk about the characters without implying that they are stand-ins for their entire age cohort.