‘Bodies’ first great generation Z thriller
Hall unnerving in ‘Resurrection’
‘B odies Bodies Bodies’ might just be the first great Gen Z thriller. In director Halina Reijn’s film is a razor-sharp satire of a very specific kind of modern privilege set inside an escalating murder mystery in a remote mansion as a hurricane rages outside.
Dripping in neon, platitudes, sweat and fear, “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” is playful, cutting and never dull. The events are limited to one long night, but the toxic tensions were boiling over long before an actual corpse is introduced to the party.
Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) has decided to take her new girlfriend, Bee (Maria Bakalova), to meet her oldest friend, David (Pete Davidson), who is hosting a kind of end of the world rager in his parents’ mansion to ride out a hurricane. Sophie reassures Bee that her friends aren’t as nihilistic as they seem online and Bee looks on like anyone in a new relationship would: With nervous hope.
It is not immediately evident that this film is about the young adult children of obscene wealth until Sophie drives up to a mansion that Daisy Buchanan might find impressive. This is no 1980s-greed-isgood portrait of young affluence, with cashmere cable knits and Lacoste polos, nor is it a ’90s version bedecked in designer logos. These are the kids who only other wealthy kids would recognize as wealthy, who know enough to apologize for their privilege but also enough to be wary of outsiders. Not that those friendships borne out of the same boarding schools and tax brackets are somehow intrinsically safer, they’re just the devil they happen to know.
In the back of the house David, his girlfriend, Emma (Chase Sui Wonders), and their friends Jordan (Myha’la Herrold) and Alice (Rachel Sennott), all excellent in their roles, are in the pool partying. It soon becomes wildly clear that Bee is one of those outsiders and that Sophie was not, exactly, expected. They are anything-goes youths, except when it comes to the sin of not having responded “yes” in a text chain.
The title of the film is derived from a game they play that involves slapping, shots and a fake killing. When the lights come back on, they have to find the body and figure out the murderer. But this tense game only brings out the festering wounds in the group and several quit in protest, including Alice’s boyfriend Greg (Lee Pace), who is trying to fit in with a crowd that is probably two decades younger then him. And then the real murders start.
Bee becomes our innocent eyes and ears to whole confusing, debaucherously bloody endeavor in which the social contract expires along with everyone’s cell phone service. The film, written by Sarah DeLappe and based on a story by Kristen Roupenian (who wrote the viral New Yorker story “Cat Person”) acutely exposes how quickly social dramas and slights can seem like cause for murder. And yet even as things devolve and more friends are murdered, the dwindling surviving characters try their best to avoid microaggressions and triggering words as though navigating a fight on Twitter.
I won’t deprive anyone of the pleasure of the surprises to come. But the reveal just makes you want to watch the whole thing again.
“Bodies, Bodies, Bodies,” an A24 release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “for violence, bloody images, drug use, and pervasive language.” Running time: 95 minutes. Three stars out of four.
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LOS ANGELES: Rebecca Hall plays a single mother to a teenage daughter whose busy life is upended when a figure from her past, played by Tim Roth, returns in “Resurrection” carrying with him the “horrors of her past.” The film from writer-director Andrew Seman made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. It stars Hall, Grace Kaufman, Michael Esper, Angela Wong Carbone, and Tim Roth. The plot follows Margaret (Hall) as she tries to maintain control of her life when an abusive ex-boyfriend (Roth) re-appears in her vicinity. The film was shot in Albany, New York. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan 22, 2022, and was released in the United States on July 29, 2022, by IFC Films. The film received generally positive reviews from critics, who noted flaws in the story’s execution but commended Hall’s performance in the lead role. As with Hall’s unsettling turn in the “The Night House,” her performance in this diabolical psychological thriller promises to burrow deep in your psyche.
LOS ANGELES: Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, known for films like “Melancholia” and “Dancer in the Dark,” has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, his production company Zentropa said Monday.
The company said it released the information in order to avoid speculation about his health leading up to the premiere of his series “The Kingdom Exodus” at the Venice Film Festival next month. Zentropa said von Trier, 66, was diagnosed at the beginning of the summer.
“Lars is in good spirits and is being treated for his symptoms,” producer Louise Vesth said in a statement. “And the work to complete ‘The Kingdom Exodus’ continues as planned.”
In his four decades of filmmaking, von Trier has won some of the most prestigious international film awards, including the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or for “Dancer in the Dark.” His films and comments have sometimes stirred up controversy as well. He was famously banned from Cannes for seven years after making comments sympathetic to Nazis during a 2011 press conference. Von Trier returned to the festival in 2018 with the serial killer drama “The House That Jack Built.”
“The Kingdom Exodus” is the third, and final, season of a series which first premiered in 1994 in Denmark, but have not been widely available. (AP)