Though, at first blush, it may look like Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies has more in common with the “elevated horror” fare that the branding phenomenon/producer-distributor A24 releases, it slots better into another one of their occasional subgenres: that of the “morons getting murdered” variety. When put in the company of films like Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire, Daniel Scheinert’s The Death of Dick Long, and even Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the intent and pleasures of Reijn’s black comedy become more evident, and any comparison to the high-minded output of Aster and Eggers (the former who has pretensions of comedy in his work, and the latter who made an out-and-out comedy in the guise of a Lovecraftian cosmic horror tale) or the conformist yet ironic slashers that the studio occasionally releases (Slice, X, the upcoming Pearl) is unworkable. Rejin’s certainly aware of genre conventions, but she’s actively working to subvert our expectations in the search for some greater joke. And when she does land on that film-transforming gag in the final minutes of the movie, it’s nearly sublime in just how deflating — and incredibly funny— it is in practice. It sure does take its sweet time getting there, though.
At its core, Bodies Bodies Bodies is a variation on the old “somebody actually gets killed in a parlor game/dinner theater performance/frat kegger” plot line: a group of zoomer rich kids gathers at one of their parents’ palatial estates to party out the duration of a hurricane, one not strong enough to have them fearing for their lives and/or property but the kind of storm that’s just dangerous enough to feel fun, a burlesque apocalypse supplied by nature with no cover charge. With two exceptions – those being Bee (Maria Bakalova), a Russian immigrant who is partnered up with Sophie (Amanda Stenberg), the group’s most estranged member, and Greg (Lee Pace), a goofball party-boy elder and drifter who was lured to the group by the promise of easy sex and good drinks and fun hangs with Alice (Rachel Sennott), a Tinder-using podcast host who is as vapid as she is amusing – the nucleus of the party all knew each other in high school and know each other’s business. Sophie, freshly sober, is slightly at odds with everyone, having come to reconnect with her best friend (and the party’s host) David (Pete Davidson, who is just giving Ye ammunition at this point) during a tough-ish time. His girlfriend, Emma (Chase Sui Wonders), an actress who isn’t as solid as she thinks she is, and tough-talking Jordan (Myha’la Herrold), who can’t seem to take her eyes off Bee, are skeptical of her presence. But everybody seems to want to have a good time, and it looks like, for a minute, things might be alright.
This setup drags out a bit: we learn a lot about the characters, though it’s never as engaging or as amusing as one would hope that the build-up to such a solid payoff would be. Reijn takes her sweet time setting up red herrings left and right, and by the time the gang sits down to play the game that the film takes its title from – sort of a “Mafia” style romp mixed with hide-and-seek, where the assembled have to root out the killer – the film feels sort of sluggish. Luckily, Davidson and Pace rescue the vibe, and their male-pattern aggression and bluster are mined for equal amounts of tension and laughter (Pace fakes being truly “dead” after they turn the lights on, and Davidson’s response is amazingly funny and-matter-of-fact in true frat boy fashion). An acrimonious argument occurs, and the two men depart, leaving the rest of the group to continue along and pick up the pieces – which mainly involves them looking at their phones, of course. But then the lights cut out, and the mansion loses power, and shit starts getting fucked up. You know that old statement about how society is only three absent square meals away from collapse? Well, take away cell service (the mansion’s conveniently in a dead zone) and wi-fi and then throw a dead body into the mix, and what you wind up with is chaos, with the mansion turning into a sort of hype-house Lord of the Flies, sans Conch Shell.
I don’t want to spoil where things wind up, but as you’d expect, everybody follows horror convention – defaulting to groupthink at the worst possible times, arguing among themselves, and then splitting up right before shit starts to get real – and the remaining members of the friend group fight ceaselessly once each of their theories about the killer get disproved. But the film’s structure goes out of its way to preserve some of its surprises for the third act, which doesn’t work in practice: the lack of momentum in the first act is partially due to the withholding from Reijn and her writers. This makes for an immensely entertaining finish, but just a little more obviousness would go a long way towards making these conflicts clearer to the viewer. With one exception, the film is astonishingly well-cast: Sennott demonstrates her much-talked-about skills as a comedian, providing most of the film’s best laughs, and Pace and Davidson occupy fun spaces on the poles of modern masculinity, with the former agreeably playing against type (he’s laconic and goofy, as opposed to suave and regal) and the latter being the kind of affable worm that he’s mined his whole screen persona from, though with a hint of petulant rage boiling within it. The one exception is Bakalova, who feels miscast: she feels like a name added to the bill to capitalize on her post-Borat popularity, and though she’s not bad in the role – her expressive face makes her a pretty compelling working-class entry point into this world of affluenza-afflicted excess – there’s no chance for her to showcase her fearless skills as an actor in the way one perhaps hoped when they saw her name on the poster.
But to bring it all home, the Morons Getting Murdered subgenre is defined by its two contradictory facets: It both loves and hates its characters, eeking uncomfortable delight from the audience as it puts them through the wringer, and our capacities for kindness and cruelty are juxtaposed with each other. It’s the essence of schadenfreude, an example of just yet comedic tragedy. It revolves around the extraordinary – be it the crime-film personas that make up the cast of Free Fire, the shameful truth at the heart of Dick Long, or the intensely awkward moral universe of Lanthimos – being placed up against the wholly ordinary (the limits of the human body, the panicked reaction of a friend group desperate to conceal a secret, the anxieties that underpin the upper-middle-class American family and how quickly they can be exploited), and Bodies Bodies Bodies follows in that tradition well. It puts an average gang of Zoomers together in an extraordinary circumstance and lets them try to think their way out of it in ways believable and wholly fantastic, with its bitterly ironic reveal coming close to equaling the levels of satisfied laughter at the end of Dick Long, but without the jarring shock that might rock the minds and morals of those who sought out Scheinert’s solo work after Everything Everywhere. It’s a credit to Reijn’s skill that she navigates the film to that climax despite the rough waters at the start of the voyage, and like some English guy said once upon a time, all’s well that ends well.