Bodies Bodies Bodies Review

Hurricane parties and the premise behind them are only funny when Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day are drafting up contracts to hand out to unsuspecting shoppers. Bodies Bodies Bodies makes do with the premise and subsequently devolves into a commentary. Staging a murder mystery and devolving from there, it is another inevitable A24 piece that will pack itself full of relevant comedians and up-and-comers but not quite round itself out. Hard it is to care for the upper middle class, it is harder still to care for the lack of momentum, the uninteresting characters and their depravity that seems to be spurned out of the blue. Bodies Bodies Bodies has become a caricature of what A24 hope to do with their work, and Halina Reijn profiles the most annoying parts of film Twitter.  

Bloodied party-goers try and make a series of unfortunate murders and misadventures about themselves. If there were ever a time to profile the main character syndrome, now is the time to do it. But to do that without the mockery it deserves is a wild change of pace that does little for the performers are the heart of this. Nobody gets off lightly as the close-ups of shocked and bloodied faces, the tired thrills of a house without power, continue to drone on. A series of unbelievably contrived and unfortunate events follow through on Bodies Bodies Bodies, which neither makes much use of its gore nor warrants the use of it whatsoever. Happenstance hurricanes and a breakdown of trust in eerie settings are kickstarted, fumbled through and ended by unlikeable characters that are soon to be the face of this sort of feature. 

Brace yourselves as they do for the hurricane then. Pete Davidson and Rachel Sennott are the big supporting draws here, and as much as they are talented elsewhere, their portrayals here are missing the points of the caricatures they provide. Criticism not of the podcaster, the party-goer or the TikTok influencer, but a concession that this is the future and to mock it will get the cast nowhere. But embracing it peddles it backwards, an out-of-touch social commentary pop that withers at the first sight of anything that could come vaguely close to dangerous or delightful criticism. Jabs and punches are thrown by characters who, at their core, are completely empty. They are representations first, and people second. Shakes and shivers of the dark night and the horrors that await those fundamental fears of the dark are never exposed for what they could or should mean. 

Bodies Bodies Bodies is as up itself as it gets and it makes for an appalling viewing. Nothing else can come from a feature where the neon reds of old are replaced by the party glowsticks of green and now. Unconvincing final confrontations and leading performances between Amandla Stenberg and Maria Bakalova do well to weather the storm of a flittering horror feature that never gets to grips with what style it wants to take. Does it want commentary? Gore? Articulations of society and the grip it has on people, the circumference of social media ebbing over into the lives of those who no longer trust what they read and see? Whatever the case, Bodies Bodies Bodies fails to grasp at anything, and is as empty and shallow as the characters within.