What would the summer of 2022 be without a good old-fashioned slasher murder mystery! I was really unsure about this movie based off of the promotional material I saw for it beforehand, and just the fact that this idea - at face value - is not one of originality. A bunch of teenagers stuck in a giant mansion getting picked off one by one rings a lot of bells. The concept itself seems overdone, but it’s the execution (har har) here that puts Bodies Bodies Bodies into the upper echelon.
SYNOPSIS: In an isolated family mansion, a group of rich 20-somethings decides to play Bodies Bodies Bodies, a game where one of them is secretly a “killer” while the rest tries to “escape”. Things take a turn for the worse when real bodies start turning up, setting off a paranoid and dangerous chain of events.
I’d like to say that I’ve actually played this game before with some friends. Granted, it didn’t turn into a bloodbath like it did here, but it was a lot of fun. The double-layering of both the game, and the actual murderer on the loose worked really well together, and added to the ambiance of the movie.
The single setting of the mansion and the hurricane that wipes the power out was really spooky as well. Given this scenario, you have to have a valid reason for no one to be able to escape, and in this movie it’s set up in a clever way that I wasn’t expecting, and that didn’t feel forced. All of the decisions made with the script were very planned out, and a lot of things in the film enhance the characters without ever being explicitly stated.
We have a lot of characters in this movie, and not all of them really get to shine equally I would say. Rachel Sennott was phenomenal in this movie and she pretty much steals the entire show. If it wasn’t for her, this movie would be a hell of a lot less funny and overall not as interesting despite her not being fleshed out too much. Pete Davidson is… pretty much Pete Davidson, yeah there’s not much to him honestly but I enjoyed him in this movie as usual. Lee Pace, Chase Sui Wonders and Myha’la Herrold were all great in this as well, but pretty underutilized for the most part.
Amandla Stenberg was great as well, I haven’t disliked a character this much in a long time and I was practically begging for her to bite the dust. She’s so manipulative and it really comes out in some of the more dialogue-heavy scenes.
The scenes where everyone is uncontrollably yelling and screaming at eachother were my favorite. The tensions were high, and there was a point in the movie where I believed the killer could be literally any one of these characters. The movie is, without a doubt, making fun of the slasher subgenre and Generation-Z simultaneously, and the blend really works. The writing pokes fun at Gen-Z vocabulary and stereotypes in a way that’s very on the nose, but never overbearing - but I will say, I don’t think it would’ve worked as well if these actors weren’t doing such an outstanding job in every scene. Everyone killed it (har har).
But without a doubt, the absolute SHOWSTOPPER of this movie was Maria Bakalova as the lead. I was taken aback by just how powerful her performance was in this movie. She was so instantly relatable and likeable in every way, and she had some serious emotion in one scene towards the end that was fantastic. I can’t wait to see her in more stuff.
This movie wasn’t overwhelmingly scary at any given time, but the tensions were always high (sexually and otherwise). I will say I was expecting this to be a bit more graphic given it’s R-rating and slasher-tendencies, so I was a little disappointed in that aspect. But I think this movie is less about the killer themselves, and more about the paranoia that ensues due to them being on the loose. You have a group of young, drugged up - and quite frankly, terrible - people who all have their dirty little secrets and grudges against each other; so, it’s all about what’s been boiling inside them from the jump, and how that manifests from scene to scene. |
This was really fun! It’s the perfect capstone to the summer, and a great addition to the A24 catalogue. Seeing all these characters scream and yell at one another almost serves up the same entertainment level as reality television at times, and when you add the high-tension killer-on-the-loose aspect to all of that, this makes for a blast.
8/10
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