Bod­ies Bod­ies Bodies

It is a truth uni­ver­sal­ly acknowl­edged that any afflu­ent Amer­i­can young per­son with an emp­ty house for the week­end must organ­ise a house par­ty. Risky Busi­ness, Super­bad, Project X, Books­mart… there’s a rich tra­di­tion in Hol­ly­wood of doc­u­ment­ing kids let­ting loose, and no mat­ter the genre, pack­ing a hor­mone-heavy group of col­lege grads into a con­fined space is a sure-fire recipe for chaos.

So it goes in Hali­na Reijn’s slash­er Bod­ies Bod­ies Bod­ies, from a screen­play by Sarah DeLappe, and based on a premise by Kris­ten Roupen­ian, whose short sto­ry Cat Per­son became a glob­al sen­sa­tion when it was pub­lished in the New York­er in 2017. Sev­en friends assem­ble at a remote man­sion for a hur­ri­cane par­ty, where their promised night of debauch­ery quick­ly devolves into car­nage after a game of Bod­ies Bod­ies Bod­ies – a vari­a­tion on the par­ty game Mur­der in the Dark – goes bad­ly wrong.

These sexy young folk are Jor­dan (Myha’la Her­rold), Emma (Chase Sui Won­ders), David (Pete David­son) and Alice (Rachel Sen­nott), plus Alice’s old­er him­bo boyfriend Greg (Lee Pace). Then there’s the recent­ly sober Sophie (Amand­la Sten­berg), who arrives with her shel­tered new girl­friend Bee (Maria Bakalo­va) in tow. Secrets come to the sur­face, ten­sions begin to fray, and pret­ty soon every­one is at each other’s throats – literally.

Rei­jn and DeLappe aim for a hyper-cur­rent Gen Z tone – which does mean the film is like­ly to age as well as milk – com­plete with Tik­Tok dances and tone polic­ing, though even spo­ken by some of Hollywood’s hottest young stars, the dia­logue tends to come across as a lit­tle forced.

The char­ac­ters them­selves are uni­form­ly dis­lik­able in dif­fer­ent ways, a vapid group of mid­dle-class kids with seem­ing­ly no inter­ests beyond par­ty­ing and bitch­ing about one anoth­er. Bee, the osten­si­ble audi­ence sur­ro­gate, is an excep­tion, but so under­writ­ten as to give Bakalo­va – who was a high­light of 2020’s Borat: Sub­se­quent Moviefilm – lit­tle room to flex her com­ic skills.

The stand­outs among the cast are Sen­nott and Pace, who make for a charm­ing­ly obliv­i­ous odd cou­ple. They man­age to make the most of their thin­ly sketched char­ac­ters, and it’s a shame we don’t real­ly get to see more of them once the body count racks up.

The ​‘par­ty game gone wrong’ trope is a clas­sic in hor­ror cin­e­ma, so there’s a ker­nel of a good idea at the heart of Bod­ies Bod­ies Bod­ies. Yet this Gen Z refresh does come across as a lit­tle try-hard in spir­it – it’s a film that makes ges­tures to con­tem­po­rary pop cul­ture with­out real­ly hav­ing much to actu­al­ly say about how young peo­ple inter­act with each oth­er in our hyper­con­nect­ed age, or indeed if they’ve learned any­thing from a life­time spent absorb­ing hor­ror movies and true crime YouTube videos.

It’s pass­able as a mild­ly amus­ing twist on the slash­er genre, but its lack of strong iden­ti­ty or coher­ent the­sis means there’s lit­tle that sticks in the mind after the cred­its role, and ulti­mate­ly does a dis­ser­vice to its crop of tal­ent­ed stars.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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