Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022, dir. Halina Reijn, US) by Kymm Zuckert

“Our friend is dead, so if you could just, like, not escalate the situation.”

“I’m not escalating, you’re holding a knife and you’re moving your hands while you talk!”

Bodies Bodies Bodies is a reasonably fun little horror film with a good amount of laughs. It’s not bad at all, but neither is it entirely great. It’s a base hit. 

It starts with a new couple, Sophie (Amandla Stenberg, Rue from The Hunger Games) and Bee (Maria Bakalova, Oscar nominated for Borat), macking on each other before heading to a hurricane party at a mansion. 

The guests are all a bunch of rich, spoiled 20-somethings, except for Bee, who is an Eastern European émigré, and another guest’s partner, Greg (an unrecognizable Lee Pace, whom I still think of as the guy from Pushing Daisies, aka 15 years ago), who is in his 40s.

Not everyone is overjoyed to see Sophie show up, as apparently she hasn’t been active in the group chat since she was in rehab, and they didn’t know she was coming. David (Pete Davidson from SNL and a gossip rag near you) is the homeowner, or rather the child of the homeowners, Sophie’s best friend since preschool. Everyone is louche and on drugs and making TikTok dance videos. 

Sophie suggests playing Bodies Bodies Bodies, a game most of us know as Murder, when everyone picks a piece of paper, and whomever gets the one with the X is the murderer, taps someone in the dark, who falls to the floor, and then everyone has to guess who the murderer is. 

Of course, this being a horror movie, the murders don’t stay quite as pretend as one always hopes they do, and soon the evening devolves into both killings, and also home truths, like, “You’re silencing me!” and “She hate-listens to your podcast!” 

It is pretty funny, and so of the moment that it will look completely out of date in about four months. The performances are good, the relationships are interesting, but the whole movie feels a little long, like there is a baggy 20 minutes in the last act, which is odd, considering that the movie is 1h 35m long. 

Bodies, Bodies, Bodies won’t change your life, but there are worse ways to spend an August afternoon than in an air conditioned theatre watching it. 

This maybe sounds a little damning with faint praise, but it was one of those “all in all, it wasn’t bad!” kind of movies, and there is not much more enthusiastic than I can get. 

Kymm Zuckert is an actor/writer/native Angelino. When Kymm was a child, her parents would take her to see anything, which means that sometimes she will see a film today and say, “I saw that when I was eight, I don’t remember any of that inappropriate sex stuff!” Check out her entire 365 day blog @ https://365filmsin365days.movie.blog