Bodies Bodies Bodies Is Sus
But its answer to "whodunnit?" is perfect
No one who’s played a social-deduction game needs Bodies Bodies Bodies to tell them the havoc they can wreak on otherwise good friends. Everyone playing Werewolf could be the werewolf, just as everyone in Among Us is sus; the more you deny you’re the killer, the less anyone believes you. Turning one of those games into an actual murder mystery is a clever conceit, if also one that Halina Reijn’s film doesn’t make the most of — largely because pointing out its own cleverness seems to have been the primary motivation for making the film in the first place. Following seven friends (Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, Myha’la Herrold, Chase Sui Wonders, Rachel Sennott, Lee Pace, and Pete Davidson) who throw a house party during a hurricane, Bodies Bodies Bodies doesn’t take long to live up to its title.
Not that you’ll mourn most of them much, as this actually could have happened to a nicer group of people. It might be said that funny slashers are those in which you root for the villain and scary slashers are those in which you root for the victims, with Bodies Bodies Bodies landing firmly in the former category. Most of the twenty-somethings not-so-secretly resent one another or worse, and petty snipes abound; anyone who was blown away by Bakalova’s fearless performance in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm will be disappointed by how little opportunity she’s given to show off her range here. The result is essentially Clue updated for the zoomer set. That includes utterly of-the-moment dialogue — “gaslighting,” “ableist,” and “toxic” are all given pride of place — that feels too clever by half some time after the second murder. And since torches and pitchforks are in short supply, our woke mob opts for cellphone flashlights and kitchen knives instead once the corpses — and questions — begin piling up.
That’s all well and good, but the film is too fixated on skewering its narcissistic, oversensitive ensemble to ever be anything close to scary. That isn’t damning in and of itself, as many a comedy/horror standout has leaned closer to one end of the spectrum than the other, but by the time you realize who did what (and how, and why) you’ll mostly be glad that everyone else is dead — but not entirely. For all its flaws, Bodies Bodies Bodies is saved by the fact that its answer to “whodunnit?” is utterly perfect for the story it’s telling; unlike so much else in the film, it’s also exactly as clever as it thinks it is.