The first Bod­ies, Bod­ies, Bod­ies trail­er is all fun and games until some­one gets hurt

It’s a clas­sic par­lor game, a sta­ple of the wee small hours dur­ing slum­ber par­ties: every­one draws a card, and who­ev­er gets the one marked with an X must play the ​‘mur­der­er,’ dis­patch­ing their ​‘vic­tims’ while fum­bling about in the dark as the oth­er com­peti­tors try to guess who’s behind the spree. But in the upcom­ing Bod­ies, Bod­ies, Bod­ies, the pas­time that lends the film its title turns fright­en­ing­ly lit­er­al as a night of fun turns into a tooth-and-nail fight to survive.

The first trail­er for the much-buzzed-about hor­ror pic­ture arrived online this morn­ing, fol­low­ing up on a well-received pre­mière ear­li­er in the year at South by South­west. With an of-the-moment pedi­gree — the ​‘sto­ry by’ screen­play cred­it goes to Kris­ten Roupen­ian of Cat Per­son noto­ri­ety, and the cast includes Gen Z‑ish tal­ents like Amand­la Sten­berg, Pete David­son, Maria Bakalo­va, and Rachel Sen­nott — it could be just the thing to perk up the dol­drums of late-sum­mer moviegoing.

Over the course of one long night in a tony man­sion, a house par­ty sends long-sim­mer­ing ten­sions with­in a friend group to the sur­face: Sophie (Stend­berg) has just got­ten out of rehab and has brought along her new girl­friend Bee (Bakalo­va), while influ­encer Alice (Sen­nott) has made things even more awk­ward by invit­ing her much-old­er boyfriend Greg (Lee Pace). Everyone’s got grudges, but the char­ac­ters will have to fig­ure out whose are bit­ter enough to moti­vate murder.

Erin Brady, our crit­ic-on-the-scene in Austin for SXSW, found her­self tak­en in by the black­ly com­ic may­hem, writ­ing that ​“It’s easy to get swept up in the film’s vibe, so why both­er resist­ing?” She also reserved spe­cif­ic praise for the script’s flu­en­cy in the catch­phras­es of Gen­er­a­tion Z: “…instead of pok­ing fun direct­ly at itself, it embraces the absur­di­ty of the group’s sit­u­a­tion, as well as the ongo­ing online cul­ture Gen Z is expe­ri­enc­ing. While the usage of buzz­words like gaslight­ing and tox­ic might lead to some cringey dia­logue, it knows that these char­ac­ters are using it in a mis­placed or weird way, lead­ing to some pret­ty fun­ny moments.”

Among the many mark­ers of its time and place — a snip­pet of a Tik­tok dance, accu­sa­tions of ​“silenc­ing” — there seems to be a more uni­ver­sal sto­ry about the ten­sions that arise with­in a social cir­cle pushed to the point of break­ing. While it’s not the first movie to ask ​“what if The Big Chill took a left turn into vio­lence?” this will be the first one to do so for the young peo­ple of today.

Bod­ies, Bod­ies, Bod­ies comes to US cin­e­mas on 5 August. A date for the UK has yet to be set.