Here’s a really outdated manner to consider a film about very younger individuals: In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus — please don’t go, I promise this shall be humorous — feels compelled to speak about homicide. He says it’s unhealthy (fairly uncontroversial) after which, as Jesus tales are wont to do, takes a wild left flip 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 feel, could be the biblical origin of the phrase “talk shit, get hit.” Only, it’s extra excessive than that. It’s extra like “talk shit, get got,” elevating unresolved animosity to the seriousness of homicide. Bodies Bodies Bodies is a really fashionable expression of this sentiment. It’s a film the place a bunch of associates who don’t really like or know a lot about one another collect in a home, every of them an absolute stress cooker of gossip and ailing will, earlier than turning on one another as individuals begin mysteriously dying. It’s form of a horror film, nevertheless it’s largely very humorous.
Director Halina Reijn’s blunt however efficient social satire — issues get actually nasty when the Wi-Fi is out, Reijn notes in interviews — takes place in a single evening, as Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) brings her new girlfriend, Bee (Maria Bakalova), for a weekend with associates (together with Rachel Sennott, Pete Davidson, and Lee Pace) in an enormous outdated home. What begins as a celebration sport about homicide leads to precise homicide, and all the things everybody has been holding towards one another instantly erupts to the floor as the assembled 20-somethings strive to determine who is killing them.
What’s nice about Bodies Bodies Bodies isn’t essentially its plot or commentary, however the manner during which it presents an up to date set of Agatha Christie-style archetypes drawn from lives lived online. The jokes come from how these archetypal characters talk (or don’t) with one another, as private emotions and failings are mediated or disguised by therapy-speak and the memetic bon mots. (The funniest joke entails a personality’s star chart.)
As our reviewer famous when the movie premiered:
The filmmakers make the compelling option to ratchet up each the bloodshed and the absurdity in tandem. Rather than letting satire give technique to horror-movie rigidity, they make the recriminations and defensiveness more and more louder and extra ridiculous as the characters really feel extra endangered. At one level, mortal peril is interrupted by the equally stunning betrayal that one pal could also be hate-listening to a different’s podcast.
Bodies Bodies Bodies wasn’t a blockbuster by any means upon launch, garnering simply shy of $14 million throughout its modest run. But a film so transparently about how being online has disrupted our offline interactions is maybe greatest suited for a streamer like Netflix, the place it may be endlessly seen, dissected, and memed by individuals each in on the joke and woefully blind to it. Kind of like Jesus.
Told you it could be humorous.
Bodies Bodies Bodies is now streaming on Netflix.
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