Director – Halina Reijn, Screenplay – Sarah DeLappe, Story – Kristen Roupenian, Producers – Ali Herting & David Hinojosa, Photography – Jasper Wolf, Music – Disasterpeace, Visual Effects – Cadence Effects (Supervisor – Craig Crawford), Special Effects Supervisor – Johann Kunz, Production Design – April Lasky. Production Company – 2Am Productions.
Cast
Amandla Stenberg (Sophie), Maria Bakalova (Bee), Pete Davidson (David), Myha’la Herrold (Jordan), Lee Pace (Greg), Rachel Sennott (Alice), Chase Sue Wonders (Emma)
Plot
Sophie and her girlfriend Bee turn up unannounced at the home of David’s parents where he and a group of mutual friends are holding a party as the hurricane comes. The group settle in and start partying. They decide to play a game of Bodies Bodies Bodies in which one of the group selects a piece of paper that is marked with an x and becomes the killer, the lights are turned out and the killer taps a victim on the shoulder where the victim must ‘die’ and the others guess who the murderer is when the lights are turned back on. Things take a turn for the deadlier when David stumbles against the window with his throat slit. The party atmosphere in the house then turns to fear and suspicion as the group turn on themselves accusing each other and more bodies begin to pile up.
This was the second film, the work in the English language, for Dutch director Halina Reijn who had previously directed the non-genre Instinct (2019) and created the tv mini-series Red Light (2020-1). Before that, Rejn had a career as an actress going back to the early 1990s. The film comes with a story from Kristen Roupenian, who suddenly become an It writer after the viral success of her internet dating short story Cat Person (2017), although her script for the film was apparently substantially rewritten. The film opened at the SXSW festival and then went into wide release, garnering some quite reasonable reviews.
The inspiration for Bodies Bodies Bodies may well have come from the recent hit of Ready or Not (2019). That made an innocuous party game into the basis of a horror film and featured a bunch of people hunting others through a mansion. This takes another game – the so-called Bodies Bodies Bodies (when I played it as a kid, it used to be called Murder in the Dark) where one person in group picks a card making them a murderer and they must ‘kill’ someone else when the lights are out and everyone else has to guess who the killer is. Similarly, this is spun out into a horror variation with people running through a mansion.
The whole film is economically contained to a single location for the duration. The scenario is fairly much the set-up for a standard Slasher Film or perhaps, as has been noted by others, the same set-up for Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Niggers/And Then There Were None (1939), multiply filmed as And Then There Were None (1945), And Then There Were None (1974) and the BBC mini-series And Then There Were None (2015)
(l to r) Maria Bakalova, Amandla Stenberg, Myha’la Herrold and Rachel Sennott search for a killer in their midst
Bodies Bodies Bodies is a fun watch. Halina Reijn sets up the party atmosphere well. There is a talented cast at play and all slot into their roles with a great deal of fun and dialogue that bounces with a snappy bite. If I had to single out one standout among the cast it would be comedian Pete Davidson who plays with a louche, languid presence such that it becomes quite a jolt to see him bumped off early into the game. The surprise among the cast is Maria Bakalova, who plays the East European girlfriend, who is none other than Borat’s daughter from Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020).
Where Halina Reijn starts to hit her stride is about the point that the girls confront Lee Pace as he is trying to sleep in what looks like an empty ballroom. The scene has an edgy mix of paranoia and humour that vies between the girls wielding weapons accusing him of having killed Pete Davidson, while he thinks they are talking about the party game they were playing earlier, before everything goes sideways.
The film reaches a particular point of hilarity in a long scene later in the show where the remaining girls are all gathered around in the dark with Myha’la Herrold wielding a gun and the scene turns into an hilarious excoriation of each of their failings – everything from drug addiction issues to their podcasts to class privilege and having parents that teach at a public university! The scene keeps going exposing a group of self-absorbed twentysomethings with an hilariously on the ball potency, while containing a deadly undertow from about the point that Myha’la Herrold shoots Rachel Sennott in the leg for insulting her parents for being middle-class, which ends with everybody scrabbling on the floor for the gun. The film reaches an ending that turns the whole killer in the midst idea on its head with sardonic regard.
