Review of Bodies Bodies Bodies, directed by Halina Reijn

I remember when this movie first came out in theaters, and I absolutely had no desire to see it all. I was perfectly content moving on with my life and never seeing this movie because I thought the trailer was not up my alley at all, but one day, I was wandering my library aimlessly in search of something to do, and stumbled upon a DVD copy of Bodies Bodies Bodies.

It was about to be spring break, so I shrugged my shoulders, picked up the DVD, and checked it out. Unlike most other reviews and movies I watch in my life, I somehow didn’t procrastinate on watching this one at all.

I parked myself on the couch, put it into the DVD player, and watched all of it. I coincidentally remembered the first time I did try to watch this movie though halfway through—it was a Delta flight to San Diego, and I was sitting next to my parents when I started mashing my screen as soon as the image of the lead couple—which are two female-identifying characters—end up kissing in the opening scene.

I was not about to watch this kind of movie in front of my elderly conservative parents. I did end up watching this when I was only home with my sister, who would not have cared.

I regretted watching this in the end though, but let’s get on with the review.

A party and sleepover among a wealthy friend group goes wrong.

In Bodies Bodies Bodies, the protagonist is technically Bee. She’s from Eastern Europe, very much working class, and dating an American named Sophie who’s wealthy. Sophie is dragging Bee to a party with her wealthy friends from college in the middle of nowhere, run by Sophie’s friend David. I started laughing when I saw who David was actually played by: it was Pete Davidson.

It’s his family’s house the party is at, but when they pull up to the action happening at the pool, Sophie starts getting nasty looks. It becomes pretty clear early on Sophie has her own problems with the friend group, and some of the girls would prefer if she were not there at all. This is a hurricane party, so it’s intended that everyone is stuck there overnight while the storm hits.

So the party consists of David, his girlfriend Emma, who is an actress, a podcaster named Alice, her boyfriend George, and Jordan. There was someone else who fled the night before, but he’s irrelevant because he got into a fight with David. Basically, the group ends up drinking and using drugs throughout the evening, with some tensions happening early on not only between Sophie andthe other girls, but also David and the other guy Greg.

The group decides to play a game called “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” where someone is assigned to be a murderer and the rest have to figure out who it is. When David storms off in anger in the middle of the game, the hurricane hits and the power goes out.

The girls split up and wander the house, where Bee, after heading into the kitchen, finds David dead with a slash across his neck. The entire movie then ends up like this: untrusting, the group starts to accuse other people of being the source behind David’s death, first with Greg, who Bee ends up killing with a kettle bell, and then Max.

Emma is found dead not long after that, when Sophie relapses and kisses her before her death, and the remainder of the group increasingly begins to become convinced someone is out for them.

That’s when the earlier tensions begin to explode. Jordan and Alice, because Bee is not only the outsider but a foreigner and lower class, decide that she is the murderer and banish her from the house. Their suspicion lies on the fact they know Bee didn’t go to college, which is not only elitist, but kind of screwed up.

They were lied to and told Bee went to college earlier, but it seems like there was a good reason that Bee and Sophie ended up telling them that. They wouldn’t have reacted well to begin with most likely.

Anyways, when Bee comes back inside, Jordan ends up shooting Alice in the throat and goes into a rage about Sophie’s drug addiction and how she was using David to get her trust fund. Jordan gets pushed off the top floor and into a table, where she slowly dies from her injuries, and then it’s just Bee and Sophie.

Bee, unwilling to fully trust Sophie at this point, runs away, and for a moment, it seems like Sophie is the problem. But when they get ahold of David’s phone, they learn he was just an idiot using the sword in order to make a TikTok video.

And that’s Bodies Bodies Bodies, folks.

Overall Thoughts

This is labeled as a dark comedy, but I found the most humorous elements not to be the jokes, but instead the entire situation. Viewed from the perspective of a working class kid in the same age range as these characters, they all felt like archetypes that I didn’t care about because I couldn’t relate to them as people.

And maybe this is meant to be the critical commentary behind the movie, but I wanted to like this movie more. Bee is the only one relatable out of all of this, and even in the end, she really shouldn’t be staying with Sophie. She needs to move on with her life after these events, especially since they were complicit in what happened over the night. That could ruin her forever.

Follow me on Instagram and Goodreads below.