For a film that runs so efficiently on the elegant and gory dispatching of so much of its cast, the most impressive feat that the new comic thriller Bodies Bodies Bodies achieves is in creating real empathy for the emotional powder keg that Generation Z is dealing with. Xers and millennials have at least a concept of a time when everything wasn’t circling the drain, and as such can improv their way through the awkwardness of interpersonal conflict. But this ragtag bunch of youths seems all too conscious of the doom that waits around the corner long before the body count starts ramping up.
They’ve gathered at David’s family mansion, a remote sprawl of money in nature that holds lots of rooms and even more secrets. They’re all "friends" to each other’s faces and on social media, but it doesn’t take the slightest bit of exterior pressure to reduce everyone to a paranoid state of utter chaos. And David (Pete Davidson, very much aware that he is to this film what Paris Hilton was to the 2005 House of Wax remake) embodies this tightrope walk between vulnerable uncertainty and petty rage. He does so in a way that keeps the viewer from being able to make any across-the-board evaluations that aren’t immediately upended by the smart and sharp screenplay by Sarah DeLappe and the serrated cuts by former Nashvillian and editor extraordinaire Julia Bloch.
Director Halina Reijn is best known in the U.S. as the WWII party girl Ronnie in Paul Verhoeven’s 2006 masterpiece Blackbook, but she has a knack for sex and violence and characterization (and understanding American culture) in this, her English-language directorial debut, that does the mad Dutchman proud. Maria Bakalova (Oscar nominated for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), as star Amandla Stenberg’s new girlfriend Bee, does double duty both as the audience’s surrogate among these deeply hurt children and as the rest of the world’s helpless observance of America saddling up the floor and riding it off into the sunset.
This isn’t really a horror film per se, being much more focused on the satirical and mystery elements of the story, though it does deliver the goods that one might want from violent social retribution. (For sheer visceral horror, I mean sweating in your chair and wishing that you could get popcorn with powdered benzos, you could — and should — do a double feature with Fall, which is so brutally vertiginous that if it were in 3D it would have to be NC-17.) Your closest point of comparison for Bodies x3 would be 1985’s April Fool’s Day in the way it plays with genre classification, but thematically it’s more of a piece with bleak satires like The Last Supper and I Melt With You. It’s funnier than all three of those films, with movie-stealing performances from Rachel Sennott (from Shiva, Baby) as a deeply insecure podcaster and the Pieman himself, Lee Pace, as an elder-millennial boyfriend +1. Pace’s performance is an incisive and quiet critique of heterosexuality lurking in the background of a film that delights in progressive attitudes toward sexuality.
When the expected hurricane hits, and the drugs come out and the lights grow dim, everybody gets into a dance-party space and throws down to a golden oldie — Azealia Banks’ 2011 hit “212.” And maybe 11 years doesn’t feel that long ago to you. And maybe your life isn’t in immediate danger. But whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, you’ve got a measurable unit of distance — the unspannable chasm stretching between us. Bodies Bodies Bodies evinces a lot of responses, but it made me want to give a Zoomer a hug if needed and rides to the airport when asked.
