Bodies, Bodies, Bodies

 Very little can be written about Bodies, Bodies, Bodies  (Halina Reijn) without compromising the film's ingenious plot.  The modest pleasure afforded by this 2022 picture is circumscribed by its clever narration.  If you were to see the movie a second time, that is with a full understanding of its story-line and ending, I would  guess that the picture would vanish from sight.  Although it's stylishly made and persuasively acted, there's no there there except for the movie's reversal of expectations.  We  come to a genre picture of this kind with certain quasi-contractual understandings:  we should be able to identify the "last girl" in a slasher picture (of which Bodies, Bodies, Bodies is a variant); we have a sense for the order in which the miscreants and victims will be butchered; we have a general idea of how the movie will end.  Bodies, Bodies, Bodies defies all of these conventions and ends up being, on its own modest terms, a satire on the self-absorbed creatures of Gen Z, that is, a kind of morality play.

A handsome interracial lesbian couple (the picture presses all buttons) attends a house-party at a huge mansion somewhere in the mountains.  The parents are away and the 20 somethings have come to play -- the film implies that they intend to use massive amounts of drugs and engage in haphazard sexual encounters.  Everyone is very cute, snarky, and nasty (with the exception of a single mousy girl who is a Russian immigrant.)  Immediately, the viewer registers the protagonists as vicious, backbiting, and immoral.  The audience could take their immorality and self-indulgence as the nihilistic context for the murders that are about to follow -- but this is also a mistake.  Ultimately, the movie is making a point about its shallow and banal protagonists.  

After some preliminary misdirection, the kids agree to play a game in which murders are simulated and the participants have to guess the play-perpetrator.  Needless to say this doesn't go well.  And I forgot to mention that the action takes place in a hurricane after the power in the house has failed.  (Cell-phones in this sort of movie are like six-guns in old B-movie Westerns -- they have magical powers, don't need charging, can operate underwater, and, of course, reliably fail when necessary.  They have no realistic meaning but are purely instruments for narrative development.)   The movie is modestly violent, but not offensively so.  It has some funny scenes:  for instance, the girls bitch at each other about being "triggered" and having "borderline", using the shallowest and most self-aggrandizing jargon while a couple of gory corpses are underfoot.  The picture is pretty good and, if you have a couple hours to waste, recommended.