Review: Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)

What’s a horror comedy without the horror and without the comedy? Not much in my estimation, but Rotten Tomatoes disagrees. According to the site’s consensus, one could describe such a film as “Impeccably cast and smartly written” and “an uncommonly well-done whodunit.” Mainstream critics can think what they like, but Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies is a total bore: a one-note, faux-biting satire of millennial and zoomer narcissism that is as predictable and absent of personality as the worst slashers of the mid-1980s. 

The indie distributor A24, which distributed this film (of course), has acquired a cult following for its trendy mix of artsy prestige fare, elevated horror films, and movies tapped into the progressive mindset of social media-addicted culture mavens. Sure, some of the films A24 distributes are great—First Reformed, The Witch, Uncut Gems, for example—but I tend to give credit to the filmmakers for those film’s successes, not the brand that’s good at marketing to Twitter users. And if the Twitter and Letterboxd reactions of people within my social orbit are any indication, A24 is once again nailing the branding with Bodies Bodies Bodies. The Letterboxd contingent likes it. Props to A24 for knowing their audience, but count me out of the trendy online chorus. This one stinks.

Written by Sarah DeLappe and based on a story by “Cat Person” author Kristen Roupenian, Bodies Bodies Bodies is supposed to satirize the obvious and loud shortcomings of the social media generations, while playing with slasher and whodunit conventions. In the film, a bunch of 20-something friends (Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, Myha’la Herrold, Chase Sui Wonders, Rachel Sennott, Pete Davidson) and the older Tinder date (Lee Pace) of one of the girls gather in a mansion during a hurricane. They play a game of “Murder” or “Mafia” or “Werewolf” or “Bodies Bodies Bodies” as it’s called in the film, which turns into a real murder mystery when one of the friends is found dead. Someone is killing them one-by-one, they think, so they grab weapons and try to uncover the killer. Things don’t go well and more people die. 

The film’s attempt at a provocative thesis is that the real monsters are the girls and the black holes where their personalities should be. Such provocation is meant to sting the viewers who are tuned into this hyper-online culture. However, by making the characters so cartoonishly awful off the bat and by marketing solely to the very online demographic it critiques, the film gives viewers the permission to see the characters as caricatures and nothing more. It never forces the viewer to see him or herself in the characters, which renders the satire toothless. As well, any attempt to indict the viewer in the action on screen has been disproven by the film’s rapturous reception within the very subculture it attempts to satirize. If it really had any bite, it’d make people more uncomfortable.

As well, despite its horror pretensions, the film doesn’t do much to play with suspense or tension or fun kills. The runtime is only 95 minutes, which would make you think the film is breezy, but the pacing is sluggish, as Reijn depicts all the deaths in the same laidback manner, never playing with the space of the house or the sound of others moving around in the dark. There’s no mystery to the filmmaking, no desire to slow down a scene to build suspense, no desire to speed up an action to get our hearts pumping. Rather, it just follows characters walking around the dark mansion and spends most of its time in shrill arguments full of buzzwords that are meant to make extremely online viewers chuckle.

It’s all delivered in the same stylistic wash, filmed almost entirely in medium-close ups with nice bokeh, a minimalist soundtrack from Disasterpeace that doesn’t intrude too much on the action (one of the rare bright spots for the film), and a propensity to take advantage of the light sensitivity of digital cameras in order to use ambient lighting from smartphone flashlights and glowsticks. It’s a bland visual approach that masquerades as something unique and special, which could describe the characters as well. The style is as monotonous as the storytelling; every shot looks the same, every kill framed in the same manner, every confrontation constructed in the same way.

The soggy style and lack of scares or thrills wouldn’t matter so much if the film was funny. It pretends at satire, but it’s mostly schematic and drab and performed without an ounce of wit (save for Lee Pace, who manages a bit of fun with his mimbo character, and Rachel Sennott, who at least makes her character’s lame punchlines land with some authority). DeLappe’s comedic approach clarifies in a late confrontation between three of the women, in which they accuse each other of being toxic, try to garner sympathy by claiming body dysmorphia, and excuse their lies by talking about their borderline mothers. The joke seems to be that these people are awful while thinking they’re woke, which, sure, it manages to convince us of, but to what end? The narcissistic miserableness of these characters is obvious in the film’s first 10 minutes. So the joke just repeats and repeats, with little variation and no other excitement to keep us engaged. And the satire is repetitive and superficial, revealing nothing about the sub-culture depicted beyond that the people in it are fake and annoying.

At least the title of the film is honest about the repetitiveness of the whole enterprise. Bodies Bodies Bodies—three repeats of the same word, which lets us know that all we’re getting with this film is the same thing over, and over, and over, as vapid and uniform and lacking in insight as the endless scroll on the social media feeds that inspired it.

3 out of 10

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022, USA)

Directed by Halina Reijn; written by Sarah DeLappe, based on a story by Kristen Roupenian; starring Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, Myha’la Herrold, Chase Sui Wonders, Rachel Sennott, Lee Pace, Pete Davidson.

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