BODIES BODIES BODIES Review

 

So just out of sheer curiosity yesterday I looked up a review of this film after seeing Amandla Stenberg on my Instagram feed. I initially wanted to see this because Amandla is my boo, but the brief glimpse I saw from a trailer on Instagram made it look like a generic slasher movie and it looked like Amandla was going to be the only black person in the film, but I just decided to look up a review of this movie on YouTube and found someone who really liked it. I was surprised because it looked generic to me and the reviewer thought so too so I decided to buy a ticket and go out and watch it.

So is Bodies Bodies Bodies any good? This film stars Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, Myh'ala Harold, Chase Sui Wonders, Rachel Sennot, Lee Pace, and Pete Davidson. Just a quick aside, , the marketing team was wack for hardly putting Myh'ala Harold in the promotional material. Outside of Amandla and Pete Davidson all of these are unknowns to me and even with Pete Davidson I only know him The Suicide Squad. I heard on the internet apparently a lot of people don't like him and I kind of see why in this film. He does come across as annoying and dickish, but this could just be his character. His character in The Suicide Squad was also a dick too, but everyone was in that movie except for Ratcatcher. The rest of the cast of Bodies Bodies Bodies does a fine job. There is a sense of I'm not sure if this is the right word, juvenile to their performances. This probably more to do with the writing than the actors themselves. Also one of the things that turned me off from wanting to go see this movie initially was that it looked very catered to the Gen Z crowd and it is. Aside from most of the cast being young it uses a lot of buzzwords you see floating around on social media like toxic, ally, gaslighting, etc and just the general tone of how they speak.

A unique poster I found for the film

That being said, do not brush this movie off as a simple Gen Z horror movie. Bodies actually subverted my expectations and turned out quite surprising. The dressing of this movie is a lot like a typical horror movie; a group of young people in a big house in the middle of nowhere with no neighbors and there's some romance going on, but once the killing starts things get good. Firstly, I would like to say that this film isn't really a horror movie. It has some horror elements with a feel of dread and eeriness a couple times, but it's not a straight out horror movie or a slasher. I would classify this a murder mystery and growing up as a child of The Boxcar Children, that one girl with a photographic memory I can't remember, and Batman I was here for this.

A good mystery has you guessing the whole time who the killer is. The movie itself is meta about it, The people who I thought would be too obvious the movie actually comments on and part way through I'm thinking "maybe they're trying to trick us. Maybe the the person who is too obvious is actually the killer." Whether I was right or not I would leave to y'all to go out and see this. For the entire time I was watching this film I couldn't help but just let my head scatter trying to figure out who this could be and also who I want to it to be. This film makes you think you know how a scene is going to go at first and then just goes in the opposite direction or in a completely different one. The cinematography has a lot to do with this. Sure music in horror movies are usually how they build tension, but also lingering on the perspectives of certain characters for quick seconds while the rest are arguing builds on it. There are also a few shots I thought just looked really cool and creepy.

Bodies also gives layers to most of the cast. Some of the doubts from the group on who they can trust comes from internal conflict and also personal relationships between these characters and it can become emotional and I found myself in the room with these characters in these moments.

The resulting conclusion for this film was really good and I never saw it coming. I am genuinely surprised how much I liked this movie. This film is also from production and distribution company A24 who released Everything Everywhere All at Once earlier this year which is my favorite film of the year so far and with both of these movies being so good I'm going to start looking at the rest of their filmography. I will definitely be seeing this again!