Bodies Bodies Bodies, a horror film about the loss of WiFi, is now on Netflix
Here’s a very old way to think about a movie about very young people: In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus—please don’t go, I promise it’ll be funny—feels compelled to talk about murder. He says it’s bad (pretty uncontroversial) and then, as Jesus stories usually do, takes one wild left to say, “That whoever is angry with his brother without a cause will be in danger of judgment; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be in danger of hell-fire.”
This, I think, would be the Biblical origin of the expression ‘talk nonsense, get hit’. Only: it’s more extreme than that. It’s more like “talk shit, get.” got,” elevating unresolved hostility to the seriousness of murder. Bodies Bodies Bodies is a very modern expression of this sentiment. It’s a movie where a bunch of friends who don’t really like each other or don’t know much about each other get together in a house, each of them an absolute pressure cooker of gossip and ill will, before turning on each other when people mysteriously start to die. It’s kind of a horror movie, but above all very funny.
Director Halina Reijn’s blunt but effective social satire: it gets really nasty when the WiFi goes out, Reijn notes in interviews – takes place over one night, as Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) takes her new friend Bee (Maria Bakalova) for a weekend with friends (including Rachel Sennott, Pete Davidson and Lee Pace) in a big old house. What starts as a parlor game about murder turns into actual murder, and everything that’s been holding everyone back immediately comes to a head as the assembled twenty-somethings try to figure out who’s killing them.
What’s great about it Bodies Bodies Bodies isn’t necessarily the plot or the commentary, but the way it presents an updated set of Agatha Christie-style archetypes drawn from lives lived online. The jokes arise from the way these archetypal characters communicate (or don’t) with each other, while personal feelings and shortcomings are mediated or disguised by therapy-speaking and the memetic bon mots. (The funniest joke involves a character’s star chart.)
As our reviewer noted when the film premiered:
The filmmakers make the compelling choice to fuel both bloodshed and absurdity at the same time. Instead of letting satire give way to suspense in horror films, they make the accusations and defensiveness louder and more ridiculous the more threatened the characters feel. At one point, the mortal danger is interrupted by the equally shocking betrayal of one friend hatefully listening to another’s podcast.
Bodies Bodies Bodies was not a blockbuster by any means upon release and garnered much acclaim just under $14 million during its modest run. But a film so transparent about how being online has disrupted our offline interactions might be best suited to a streamer like Netflix, where it can be endlessly seen, dissected, and memed by those who are both into it and those who are woeful about it. to be ignorant of. A bit like Jesus.
I told you it would be funny.
Bodies Bodies Bodies is now streaming on Netflix.