Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)
There is a particular kind of horror film that works best as a time capsule: one so rooted in the anxieties, language, and social rituals of its precise cultural moment that watching it even a few years later feels faintly anthropological. Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) is very much that kind of film. Produced by A24 and the boutique outfit 2AM, it arrived at the tail end of a period when Among Us had become something of a pandemic-era cultural phenomenon, when TikTok had reshuffled the rules of social performance, and when a certain breed of satirical comedy was beginning to ask uncomfortable questions about whether Generation Z's relationship with irony had made sincerity practically illegal. It is a film that wears its moment on its sleeve, for better and for worse.
Dutch director Halina Reijn arrived at the project with a background rooted more in European theatre than in Hollywood genre work. Her debut feature, Instinct (2019), was a European arthouse affair dealing with control and desire, which makes her pivot to an English-language slasher-comedy with A24 backing a fairly striking gear change. The screenplay, credited to Sarah DeLappe from a story by Kristen Roupenian (whose short fiction "Cat Person" caused its own cultural firestorm when it went viral in 2017), gives the film a literary lineage of sorts, even if the finished product is considerably more interested in chaos than in careful character study. The production is polished but unremarkable in terms of physical scale: the entire thing unfolds inside a single oversized mansion, a choice that suits both the budget and the claustrophobic premise rather neatly.
The ensemble A24 assembled is genuinely well chosen for what the script demands. Amandla Stenberg, a performer who has been steadily building a varied filmography since her early years, brings an edgy, wound-up energy to the lead role. Maria Bakalova, who made such a vivid impression in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, demonstrates again that she is perfectly comfortable throwing herself into uncomfortable, comedically charged situations with total commitment. Myha'la and Chase Sui Wonders round out the group with the kind of brittle, competitive energy the premise requires. And then there is Rachel Sennott, who will be familiar to anyone who caught her in Bottoms, a film that similarly weaponised dark comedy against teenage social dynamics. Sennott has an unusual ability to be simultaneously ridiculous and believable, a combination that is considerably harder to pull off than it looks, and it serves her well here in what many viewers have identified as the film's most memorable turn.
If you take the whodunit mechanics of *ves Out and inject them straight into the veins of a group of drug-taking, wildly entitled rich kids, you get Halina Reijn’s 2022 slasher-comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies.
The premise is undeniably decent: a group of twenty-somethings hiding out in a mega-mansion during a hurricane decide to play a parlor game that is essentially a real-life, flesh-and-blood version of Among Us. Naturally, the jokes stop being jokes when the actual bodies start dropping. It’s a cracking setup for a generational satire, even if the execution trips over its own designer shoes.
I’ll be completely honest and admit I queued this up purely for Rachel Sennott. Having been thoroughly won over by her neurotic brilliance in Shiva Baby and Bottoms, I knew she had an incredibly bright future, and fair play to her, she is undoubtedly the standout here. She anchors the chaotic ensemble with a perfectly calibrated mix of deadpan air-headedness and genuine panic. The rest of the cast, including Amandla Stenberg and Maria Bakalova, do a fine job of chewing the scenery as the pampered elite, but it’s Sennott’s grounded cynicism that keeps the whole thing from floating away into pure absurdity.
Where the picture really starts to feel like a bit of a mess is in its handling of the actual mystery and the interpersonal drama. Reijn clearly wants to skewer the pampered upper-middle class, which is fine, but she does it in ways that are just painful to watch. There is an agonisingly long sequence towards the climax where the characters are essentially arguing over social media dynamics, but doing it face-to-face. It is so incredibly cringe and unrealistic that I found myself checking my phone in sympathy. You can see the satirical intent, but when the dialogue feels less like sharp commentary and more like a teenager's actual Twitter feed read out loud, the tension completely evaporates.
Then there is the finale, which is where the film truly loses me. I know some critics have praised the abruptness of the final act, but honestly, I felt it was handled really badly. After all that buildup, the story just sort of stops, ending so suddenly without any real narrative conclusion or satisfying wrap-up, just leaving us with a literal house full of bodies and a cinematic shrug. It’s at least an entertaining, visually slick slice of Gen Z horror that boasts a brilliant central performance, but its messy script and jarring final act keep it from being a true knockout.
Bodies Bodies Bodies sits in an interesting place in A24's catalogue, alongside other genre-adjacent films that are rather more interested in social observation than in delivering conventional scares. It is, on balance, a film worth your ninety-four minutes if you have any appetite for generational satire or ensemble genre comedy, particularly for the performances at its centre. Those coming to it hoping for the tightly wound mystery mechanics of something like The Invisible Man, or the sustained dread that made The Road so punishing, may find it a somewhat lighter and more frustrating experience than expected. It knows exactly what it wants to say about a certain kind of moneyed, performative young adulthood. Whether it says it well enough, often enough, is the question the film never quite settles. Sharp in flashes, shaky in the stretch run.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2022 | Watched: 2026-07-25
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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