Bodies Bodies Bodies Review: Woke Horror Splashes in Visceral Gen Z Savagery

“Don’t call her a psychopath, that’s so ableist!” The condemnation rings out in the shadowy halls of an opulent estate. Mere moments ago, a group of wealthy twentysomethings were drunkenly reveling amidst a raging hurricane, killing time with a murderously ironic party game called “Bodies Bodies Bodies.” But fake bloodshed quickly bleeds into the horrifyingly real as bitter friendships, petty resentments, and salacious secrets accumulate more corpses than the game intended.

This biting horror satire from director Halina Reijn thrusts viewers into the viper’s pit of Gen Z social politics. Beneath the veneer of necessitarian language and performative wokeness, Bodies Bodies Bodies excavates the conniving, status-obsessed id simmering within a privileged young clique. As these hedonistic rich kids become scrutinized through the bloody lens of their party game’s conceit, their carefully curated identities erode into feral self-preservation. Virtue signaling was simply their shared love language – until the survival stampede.

Chilling Narrative Threads

The stage is set for mayhem at a sprawling countryside manor, where the offspring of opulent privilege gather for one last decadent blowout before an imminent hurricane’s arrival. Sophie, recently sprung from rehab, has brought along her new girlfriend Bee – meek, unassuming, and a fish out of water among this snarling social piranha pool.

There’s Sophie’s sarcastic bestie David, who owns the palatial digs. His long-suffering actress girlfriend Emma longs to be taken seriously. The domineering Jordan carries residual feelings for her ex Sophie. Irrepressible wild child Alice arrives with her far older, awkwardly hip boyfriend Greg in tow.

What begins as the sort of nihilistic bacchanalia expected of the ennui-stricken elite quickly curdles into unmitigated chaos when the group decides to play “Bodies Bodies Bodies.” The rules are simple: one person is randomly designated the “killer,” who then silently “murders” players by giving them a light tap in the dark. When the bloody victims are revealed under the lights, the survivors must correctly deduce the culprit’s identity through an escalating crucible of accusations and suspicion.

Harmless party fun turns horrifyingly real when the first warm body hits the floor – throat genuinely slashed. As the hurricane intensifies outside and the manor’s tenuous power falters, panicked paranoia reigns. Impulsive assaults beget retaliatory violence. The body count mounts gruesomely. And these frenemies from hell must shred through their own tissue of artifice to unmask the killer among them.

Subverting slasher conventions with acerbic malice, Bodies Bodies Bodies transforms from a whodunit into a scathing examination of how little these privileged scions actually know each other beneath their curated social media personae. Nothing cuts deeper than the sword of truth.

Skewering the Social Slacktivists

Bodies Bodies Bodies wields a scalpel sharper than any killer’s blade in its satirical dissection of millennial and Gen Z culture. Director Halina Reijn marshals the horrific proceedings as a scalding rebuke of youth submerged in virtue signaling and social media posturing.

These privileged protagonists speak a dialect fluent in Newspeak: a punchline-worthy patois saturated with socially conscious buzzwords and righteous moral grandstanding. “Don’t gaslight me.” “You’re being so toxic.” “That’s ableist.” They deftly wield these coded terms as both shibboleth and shiv against one another, protective camouflage obscuring their own self-interest and insecurities.

For these indulgent characters, “wokeness” represents the hallmark of their cultivated identity – brandished with casual self-righteousness until adversity strips them of their moral veneers. Much like their generational addictions to likes, shares, and retweets, these young philosophes crave the clout of appearing conscientious without enduring its substantive follow-through.

Bridling such millennial self-obsession with the juxtaposition of shocking violence, Reijn concocts a heady brew of satirical scorn. Her savagery zeros in on how manufactured social justice dogma enables deflection from legitimate reflection or growth. These characters speak the language of accountability but live in abject dereliction of it.

Undergirding the blistering social commentary courses an unmissable class critique. The sumptuous mansion setting clearly establishes the ruling aristocracy under fire – trust fund brats so divorced from hardship, their “struggles” regress into petty squabbles over branding and likability. For the underclass Bee, an interloper amid such grotesque affluence, survival itself becomes her “Bodies Bodies Bodies.”

One could accuse Reijn of painting in reductive stereotypes – her characters thinly sketched embodiments of generational caricature embodying the worst excesses of their age cohorts. But the sheer ferocity of her satire feels galvanizing, emboldened by the gripping momentum of its horror trappings. While perhaps overly indulgent in making her point, Reijn ultimately wields her scathing skewers with refreshing audacity.

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Crafting Claustrophobic Chaos

From its ominous opening frames, Bodies Bodies Bodies establishes an aura of dread and suffocating claustrophobia under director Halina Reijn’s adroit hand. The film’s squirm-inducing sense of unease stems from Reijn’s canny camerawork and sound design, which foster a pressure-cooker atmosphere primed for eruption.

Cinematographer Jasper Wolf’s lens creeps through the cavernous mansion’s darkness with unnerving intimacy, the camera’s conspiratorial closeness making viewers uneasy witnesses to brutality. Every flicker of Rachel Sennott’s feral eyes or bead of sweat on Pete Davidson’s forehead gets an unnervingly sustained close-up. The thundering cacophony of the tempest’s downpour ratchets up the tension tirelessly. Reijn milks ample dread from simply panning across the estate’s shadowy recesses, imbuing even negative spaces with menace.

Amidst such a masterclass in cultivating fright, the director’s stellar cast ensures the humor hits just as morbidly hard. Sennott emerges as the MVP with her fearlessly unhinged turn as Alice, the chaotic wild card injecting anarchic improv energy into every scene. Her rat-a-tat delivery of deadpan insults and consummate commitment to physical lunacy anchor the film’s blend of cynical laughs and visceral thrills.

Maria Bakalova summons empathy amid the viciousness as the tongue-tied outsider Bee, grounding the hyperbolic stakes in quasi-relatable pathos. The men are essentially obligatory devices – Lee Pace as the doofus trying too hard, Pete Davidson as Davidson – but the actresses earn their standout status.

Reijn’s grasp on tonal modulation falters slightly in the film’s final act escalation, as the zinging social satire curdles into an excessively blunt instrument. The third act curtain-pull revealing the killer’s identity is undeniably cheeky, but achieves its goal through protracted convolution overly enamored with its own trickery. Still, Bodies Bodies Bodies largely succeeds in synthesizing its campy horrors and incisive cultural commentary into a bracing, nihilistic shock to the systole.

Unmasking Privileged Tribalism

Beneath its blood-soaked Grand Guignol surface, Bodies Bodies Bodies courses with scorching philosophical veins. Helmer Halina Reijn doesn’t merely satirize Gen Z paradigms with broad stereotyping – she excavates the insecurities fueling such youth culture hypocrisy in the first place. Her slashing screenplay peels back complex layers of identity construction and social signaling.

In this vicious milieu, the gradual disintegration of alliances exposes tribalism as the sole throughline keeping these damagedegos intact. Their various identities – sexual, socioeconomic, intersectional – become malleable utilities wielded as cudgels for social dominance within the friend group’s crucible. With such hazily defined parameters, “truth” devolves into blunt trauma by film’s end.

The wildly divergent romantic dynamics offer microcosmic case studies: The viperously competitive Jordan still stinging from her breakup with Sophie. David’s constant needling of girlfriend Emma reducing her to fragile self-doubt. Greg’s cringeworthy overcompensation for the age gap with boisterous Alice. Through these dysfunctional bondings, Reijn dissects how generational perspectives around love and sex remain inextricably tangled with exhibitionistic status and ego validation.

Yet any philosophical cohesion grows muddied in the film’s delirious final act escalations. The culminating bloodbath abandons deeper ingestion of its themes as it leans too indulgently into carnivalesque nihilism. Salient satirical insights into ethics and identitarianism get sacrificed on the altar of the killer’s pulpy third-act twist.

Even so, Reijn’s audacious viscera-fest concludes as a franticly compelling thrill ride emblazoned with discomforting truths. For all its generational caricatures, Bodies Bodies Bodies burrows into the psyche of youth culture with bracing acuity. It envisions an age cohort so pathologically conditioned to brand-building, even base survival instincts default to pantomimed self-mythologizing. Woke or not, when push comes to throat-slitting shove, all that’s left is the cold slap of reality.

Sardonic Slasher Surprises

For all its visceral excess and sardonic irreverence, Bodies Bodies Bodies ultimately sticks the landing as a bracing darkly comedic thrill ride propelled by searing cultural commentary. Director Halina Reijn orchestrates the mordant proceedings with devilish craft, engineering a suffocating ambiance of claustrophobia and dread through astute camerawork and sound design. Her inspired cast, headlined by Rachel Sennott’s ferocious comedic verve, invigorates the film with charisma to match its visual bravura.

Reijn’s sharpest insights, however, lancet straight through the facade of shallow wokeness blanketing the representational youth milieu. Her screenplay wields slashing satire like a machete, laying bare how even today’s most privileged scions erect hardened identities cemented by conspicuous performative virtue. For these cosseted characters, righteousness becomes just another luxury product to be marketed and weaponized for temporary social leverage.

In turning traditional slasher tropes inward upon these “socially conscious” archetypes, Reijn crafts a devilishly compelling descent into primal narcissism. Once the thematic substance gives way to the third act’s protracted splatter-fest, the film’s philosophical coherence admittedly dissipates. But by that point, its generational skewering has already struck bone.

For jaded arthouse cynics and ravenous gore-hounds alike, Bodies Bodies Bodies musters sufficient thrills and gallows giggles to warrant a stream. Those seeking a purely intellectual inquiry into class, privilege, and generational discord may be left somewhat unsated. But Reijn’s riotously tasteless and unsettling psychological provocations are not to be ignored – an audaciously uncompromising satire, dripping with acrid truths and invigoratingly youthful despite its world-weary bite.

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