Maria Bakalova and Amandla Stenberg in Bodies Bodies Bodies. Image: A24 Films/IMDb
The Gen Z characters of Halina Reijn’s whodunnit slasher Bodies Bodies Bodies are terminally online. The sun-drenched opening scenes feature a luxurious lip-lock between girlfriends Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) and Bee (Maria Bakalova), cocooned by a copse of trees. The bucolic romance quickly dissipates: in an abrupt cut, the girls are suddenly hunched over their phones, to the tune of grating iMessage click-clacks and notification dings. Sophie, a trust fund kid fresh out of rehab, has invited her working-class paramour to a getaway with her childhood friend group at a secluded manor—as Bee anxiously internet-stalks the affluent wolf pack she’s about to meet, Sophie laughs: ‘they’re not as nihilistic as they look on the internet!’
Arriving at the labyrinthine, old money estate—all spiral staircases, wood-panelling and secret crawlspaces—Bee realises that Sophie’s friends are absolutely as unfriendly as they seem, simmering with hidden jealousies and resentments. Bee proceeds to have the worst night of her life, accidentally eating an enormous batch of weed brownies and plunged into a game of ‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’ (a variation on ‘Werewolf’) in the middle of a hurricane.
We’ve seen this premise before: the image of a bunch of attractive twenty-somethings holed away in a secluded house heralds the arrival of splattered blood. And the slasher format has long been the playground for media-saturated bright young things. First emerging in the 70s and 80s, the youth-targeted slasher genre, invariably featuring casts of (mostly female) victims being picked off one by one, was revamped in the 90s by Wes Craven’s Scream series. The vintage formula had grown out of step with a generation reared in the advent of digitisation, where computers were entering homes en masse and pop culture had become increasingly synchronous as teens logged on in droves. Horror legend John Carpenter decried the ‘cynical, young, new audience who believe very sincerely that they are smarter than the movies they see.’
The teens of the Scream franchise are hyper-aware of slasher tropes (don’t answer the door, don’t leave the house, don’t answer the phone, and never say ‘I’ll be right back!’)—but, paradoxically, this familiarity with technology and tropey know-how often led to their demise. ‘They still end up falling victim to the conventions because the violence of the horror movies they watch is so prevalent and dramatised that they have grown desensitised to it,’ writes Charles Spiteri. The teens get caught up in believing a trope is playing out, while a different one is happening right behind them. Or they react to the news of a bloody murder, the sight of a costumed killer, with a flippant quip, a complacent laugh.
Decades later, the boundary between the online and the IRL has become redundant. Cher Tan sums it up, describing the current screen reality as ‘seamless, consequential and culminating in tangible and/or material outcomes. Like the physical Zoom Room, URL bleeds into IRL into URL again, a looping GIF of an ouroboros.’ This truth, universally acknowledged, has plagued filmmakers trying to depict the fluidity with which we now experience online life, and the breakneck evolution of memes, trends and vernacular. In recent horror films, there’s been a tendency to depict the internet as a nefarious portal, that feasts on the primal desire for fame and validation. Tyler MacIntyre’s Tragedy Girls (2017) follows a pair of true crime bloggers who begin murdering people to get more followers, while a rideshare driver in Eugene Kotlyarenko’s Spree (2020) livestreams his butchering of passengers in a grab for online virality. In the upcoming Australian release Sissy, the recent proliferation of wellness influencers and their self-affirming pseudoscience are used to justify splashy acts of violence.
In recent horror films, there’s been a tendency to depict the internet as a nefarious portal, that feasts on the primal desire for fame and validation.
What’s distinct about Bodies is that, while the internet has an omniscient presence in the film, its characters spend most of the runtime deprived of a Wi-Fi connection. A few minutes into their game, the manor’s generator splutters out, plummeting the cavernous rooms into darkness. A member of the party winds up with a slashed throat and Reijn makes good on the title’s promise: the bodies continue piling up. Jasper Wolf’s shaky-cam cinematography renders the once-spacious setting an incomprehensible, almost unreal space—where the only source of light comes from the white shafts of smartphone torches. Slasher conventions are toyed with and subverted. The initial deaths happen off-screen, with the film living in the in-between conversations of whodunnit games, where suspicion festers and explodes.
Bodies recognises that the boundary has collapsed, representing the internet by showing its inextricable effect on how we perceive those closest to us. Much of the joy here lies in Kristen Roupenian and Sarah DeLappe’s hyper-specific and incisive screenplay, which plays into the porousness of online and offline identities. The internet speak-heavy dialogue feels right at home in the mouths of the cast, who seem astutely selected for their own meta personas. Stenberg has been an it-girl fixture since their child actor and Rookie Mag days, while Bakalova was the breakout star of 2020’s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. Rounding out the cast are Sophie’s ex Jordan (Myha’la Herrold, star of Industry), her best friend David (Pete Davidson, mostly playing himself behind a vape cloud), his girlfriend Emma (Chase Sui Wonders, niece of Anna Sui), Alice (Rachel Sennott, Shiva Baby), who is dating the much older Greg (played by the internet’s long-time boyfriend Lee Pace).
As the characters fling verbal barbs at one another, scrambling to figure out the source of the deaths, the script basks in the triviality of online beef and the discontinuities in how we represent ourselves. Defending Greg’s innocence, Rachel rattles off the characteristics of a Tinder profile: ‘He likes nature, he’s a Libra moon! That says a lot!’ Jordan, meanwhile, casts suspicion upon Bee by pointing out the lack of information about her online. Like the teens of Scream before them, the cast is bogged down by a hyper-awareness of genre: some are convinced the killings follow the pattern of their initial, bloodless game, while others keep warning of an unseen member of their gang, who left the house a previous night. A mysterious map and a knife tucked into Greg’s backpack is seen as definite evidence that he’s a psycho-killer. The abundance of red herrings and ambiguous detours also speaks to the audience’s lived-in familiarity with the formula. Like a game of Clue, each item is lavished with slightly too much importance, with the expectation that everything will tie together in a drawing-room reveal.
As the characters fling verbal barbs at one another, scrambling to figure out the source of the deaths, the script basks in the triviality of online beef and the discontinuities in how we represent ourselves.
In the film’s best scene, informed by DeLappe’s theatre background, the characters air out their grievances in a storm of petty accusations. Sophie reveals that Jordan ‘hate-listens’ to Rachel’s podcast, while Sophie responds to mockery of her memoir writing by yelling, ‘it’s creative non-fiction, which is a valid response to life in an attention economy!’ Sophie is skewered for being inactive in the gang’s group chat—presented as a sign that she’s an unreliable and toxic friend. The writers deliberately starve the viewers of commonplace horror reveals, wherein everyone is motivated by a lurid secret: a hazing incident gone wrong, a secret pregnancy or a violent incident in someone’s childhood. Reijn appears disinterested in this type of trauma porn, suggesting that distrust and violence can bubble from something as trivial as ghosting a group chat or finding your friend’s podcast cringe. The way the characters default to absurd online platitudes, and attack each other’s perceived performativity, has a keen sense of veracity. In a life-or-death situation, where all my friends have been cast as potential killers, I would bring up that nasty thing they tweeted one time.
The thematic richness of Reijn’s film is ultimately let down by the fact she doesn’t go far enough—she builds a world where violence feels electric and real, but pulls back from letting her characters lean into these base impulses, rendering the final twist toothless. A glaring weak point is the character of Bee, whose thin backstory and sense of class tension is lazily gestured at (Ellen O’Brien outlines the film’s shallow class politics). But the film succeeds at capturing a generation whose physical reality has a symbiotic relationship with the digital. This renders it a sometimes tonally discordant film—leaning into reliable moments of camp before fizzling into sobering realism—perhaps birthing a new subgenre of Gen Z thrillers where the nefariousness of online influences can’t be easily excised from the physical realm.
Writing on the way horror films have begun technology’s contamination of our inner selves, Lauren Collee states: ‘Technology encourages the expression of multiple selves in multiple contexts, while also seeming to make their coexistence impossible…you are always in danger of being confronted with your incohesiveness, with evidence of a past self now rejected or a misinterpreted, misprocessed version of one’s archive being distributed as the real you.’ In Bodies, the way the characters behave over text, and on their profiles, becomes an embodied live round. The gaps and inconsistencies in how we present ourselves online are presented as incriminating evidence of our innate character. You can log off, touch grass, but it’s still there, under your skin.
Bodies Bodies Bodies is in cinemas now.
