Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)
Rachel Sennott made me queue this up. Simple as that. After being completely won over by her in Shiva Baby and Bottoms, I knew she was one of the most exciting young comic performers working right now, and I wasn't about to let a slasher-comedy with her name on it pass me by. Fair play to her as well, because she is the best thing in Halina Reijn's Bodies Bodies Bodies by a country mile. More on that in a moment.
The premise is genuinely cracking. Take the whodunit mechanics of Knives Out, inject them straight into the veins of a group of drug-taking, wildly entitled rich kids, and you've got yourself something with real potential. A bunch of twenty-somethings hole up in a mega-mansion during a hurricane and decide to play a parlour game that is essentially a real-life, flesh-and-blood version of Among Us. Naturally, the jokes stop being jokes when actual bodies start dropping. It's a brilliant setup for a generational satire, and for a good while, the film knows exactly what it's doing with it.
Sennott anchors the chaotic ensemble with a perfectly calibrated mix of deadpan air-headedness and genuine panic. She finds a grounded cynicism in her character that stops the whole thing from floating away into pure absurdity, and every scene she's in crackles because of it. Amandla Stenberg and Maria Bakalova do a fine job of chewing the scenery as the pampered elite, and the ensemble as a whole commits fully to playing these people as simultaneously terrified and insufferable. That's a difficult balance to strike, and mostly they manage it.
But here's where I have to be honest about where the film loses me, because it does lose me, and quite badly in places. Reijn clearly wants to skewer the pampered upper-middle class, and that's a worthy ambition. The trouble is that the satire too often mistakes authenticity for sharpness. There's a sequence towards the climax where the characters are essentially arguing about social media dynamics, but doing it face-to-face, at full volume, in the middle of what should be a mounting horror scenario. It is so agonisingly cringe and so painfully on the nose that I found myself reaching for my phone out of sheer sympathy. You can see exactly what the film is going for, but when the dialogue feels less like pointed commentary and more like someone's actual Twitter feed being read aloud, all the tension just evaporates.
And then there's the ending. I know some people have praised the abruptness of the final act as a bold choice, and I can see the argument, but I'm not buying it. After all that buildup, the story just sort of stops. No real narrative conclusion, no satisfying wrap-up, just a house full of bodies and what feels like a shrug. It left me genuinely frustrated, which is a shame, because there's enough here to suggest the film could have stuck the landing with a bit more care in the writing room.
What saves Bodies Bodies Bodies from being a disappointment is that it's entertaining almost in spite of itself. It moves quickly, it looks great, and Sennott is magnetic throughout. The premise is strong enough that even a messy script can't completely squander it. But I kept thinking about how much sharper this could have been with a tighter third act and dialogue that trusted its audience a little more. As it stands, it's a fun, visually slick piece of Gen Z horror with a brilliant central performance and a script that trips over its own designer shoes just when it matters most.
Three stars.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2022 | Watched: 2026-07-25
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Hulu
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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