Here’s a very old way to think about a movie about very young people: In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus — please don’t go, I promise this will be funny — feels compelled to talk about murder. He says it’s bad (pretty uncontroversial) and then, as Jesus stories are wont to do, takes a wild left turn to say, “That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say, ‘Thou fool,’ shall be in danger of hell fire.”
This, I think, would be the biblical origin of the phrase “talk shit, get hit.” Only, it’s more extreme than that. It’s more like “talk shit, get got,” elevating unresolved animosity to the seriousness of murder. Bodies Bodies Bodies is a very modern expression of this sentiment. It’s a movie where a bunch of friends who don’t actually like or know much about each other gather in a house, each of them an absolute pressure cooker of gossip and ill will, before turning on each other as people start mysteriously dying. It’s kind of a horror movie, but it’s mostly very funny.
Director Halina Reijn’s blunt but effective social satire — things get really nasty when the Wi-Fi is out, Reijn notes in interviews — takes place in a single night, as Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) brings her new girlfriend, Bee (Maria Bakalova), for a weekend with friends (including Rachel Sennott, Pete Davidson, and Lee Pace) in a big old house. What starts as a party game about murder results in actual murder, and everything everyone has been holding against each other immediately erupts to the surface as the assembled 20-somethings try to figure out who is killing them.
What’s great about Bodies Bodies Bodies isn’t necessarily its plot or commentary, but the way in which it presents an updated set of Agatha Christie-style archetypes drawn from lives lived online. The jokes come from how these archetypal characters communicate (or don’t) with each other, as personal feelings and failings are mediated or disguised by therapy-speak and the memetic bon mots. (The funniest joke involves a character’s star chart.)
As our reviewer noted when the film premiered:
The filmmakers make the compelling choice to ratchet up both the bloodshed and the absurdity in tandem. Rather than letting satire give way to horror-movie tension, they make the recriminations and defensiveness increasingly louder and more ridiculous as the characters feel more endangered. At one point, mortal peril is interrupted by the equally shocking betrayal that one friend may be hate-listening to another’s podcast.
Bodies Bodies Bodies wasn’t a blockbuster by any means upon release, garnering just shy of $14 million during its modest run. But a movie so transparently about how being online has disrupted our offline interactions is perhaps best suited for a streamer like Netflix, where it can be endlessly seen, dissected, and memed by people both in on the joke and woefully ignorant of it. Kind of like Jesus.
Told you it would be funny.
Bodies Bodies Bodies is now streaming on Netflix.
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