Grade: B+
Movies that are mostly an exercise in style can be quite worthwhile if something fresh and original is brought to the table. Dutch director Halina Reijn dabbles in slasher/murder mystery/horror comedy with Bodies Bodies Bodies. I’m sure it lifts from multiple influences; I personally thought of Scream, Knives Out, and Identity.
Bodies Bodies Bodies opens with Sophie and her girlfriend Bee taking a drive to a friend’s remote mansion. A handful of 20-somethings – who must be doing pretty well to live in houses like this one – are at David’s house for what they’re calling a hurricane party. A vicious storm is heading to the area, and they want to hunker down together, and drink and smoke and do drugs and enjoy each others’ bodies and play games while the elements wreak havoc outside.
Sophie and Bee arrive to meet Alice (a podcaster), David’s girlfriend Emma (an actress), Jordan (who vacillates between having a thing for Bee, and being cold and standoffish toward Bee because she has a thing for Sophie), and Alice’s very new and significantly older boyfriend Greg (I don’t remember an age being mentioned, but the actor who plays him was born in 1979). When these 7 characters are rapidly paraded on, I thought there was no way I was going to keep them all straight. I’d need a pen and notebook. It’s a testament to the abilities of writers Kristen Roupenian and Sarah DeLappe that remembering character names and getting to know them was easy-peasy. I suspect they are name-checked enough times in the script to stick in our brains, but not so much that it’s distracting.
They are in the middle of playing a game called Bodies Bodies Bodies, when they get into an argument about who the “murderer” is. Somebody goes to bed, and another – offended that everybody immediately assumes they’re the “killer” – leaves in a huff. Inevitably, the storm knocks the power out. Conveniently for the plot, the Wi-Fi is dead too as a result, and the one vehicle there won’t start due to details that were unclear and glossed over. A character checking on the generator finds a body right outside with a slashed throat. The group of 7 dwindles as people start disappearing, only for their corpse to be discovered.
I recognized only two actors: SNL legend Pete Davidson as David, and Maria Bakalova – the Bulgarian actress who earned an Oscar nomination for her breakthrough performance as Borat’s daughter in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm – as Bee. My favorite of the ones unknown to me was Rachel Sennott as Alice. The score, by Disasterpeace, is unique, memorable, and immersive. Instruments create sounds that mimic what’s going on in the world of the movie, and it certainly stimulates the senses. This is a hip, fun, funny, attractive ensemble. There’s a lengthy scene that’s a showstopper – where the remaining characters argue and muse and toss out trendy buzzwords and phrases like “gaslighting,” “ally,” “breaking the stigma of mental health,” etc.
I was left with two questions at the end. Did that person ever get to see the texts, and what did they find? And: now what? However, everything that gets explained is satisfying and holds water. Bodies Bodies Bodies is rough around the edges, but it lives and breathes and has its own pulse, just when we think we’ve seen this before. I don’t recall a slasher film ending like this one does. I liked the twist, and enjoyed replaying the film in my head, ruminating on the interesting macabre fall of the dominos.
Grade: B+
Film Reviews by Mark 
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