If Clue, Spring Breakers, and a TikTok comment section had a baby and left it unsupervised in a hurricane, you’d get Bodies Bodies Bodies—a neon-drenched horror satire that thinks it’s clever, but mostly just reminds you why group texts should be outlawed.
Directed by Halina Reijn, this 2022 film fancies itself a modern take on the slasher genre, draped in irony, social commentary, and enough glow sticks to fuel a mid-level EDM festival. It’s marketed as Gen Z’s Scream, but ends up feeling more like Gen Z’s Scream…ing into the void.
If your idea of suspense involves watching people whine, vape, and accuse each other of being “toxic,” you’re in for a treat. For the rest of us, it’s 94 minutes of first-world problems, petty insults, and bloodless kills—both literal and metaphorical.
🧠 The Plot (such as it is)
A bunch of rich 20-somethings—too wealthy to be relatable, too dumb to survive—gather at a remote mansion to ride out a hurricane. Naturally, they decide to pass the time by doing drugs, drinking, and playing a party game called “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” which is sort of like Werewolf, but with more accusations, less logic, and zero fun.
Then someone actually dies. But is it murder? Or just another bad vibe in the house of broken ring lights?
From there, the movie descends into a whodunnit filled with screaming, crying, gaslighting, TikTok-worthy breakdowns, and enough buzzwords to trigger a Twitter suspension. Imagine The Breakfast Club if they hated each other, had frontal lobotomies, and were sponsored by Instagram therapy memes.
💀 The Characters: Influencers in the Wild
Let’s run through our rogues’ gallery of human Pinterest boards.
Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) is a recovering addict and chaotic magnet for drama who shows up uninvited with her new girlfriend Bee, clearly expecting a hug but getting side-eye and condescension instead.
Bee (Maria Bakalova) is the outsider, wide-eyed and mute for most of the film, like if a Funko Pop grew anxiety. She’s supposed to be the audience surrogate, but has the emotional range of a soft-boiled egg.
David (Pete Davidson) is… Pete Davidson. Which is to say, sarcastic, possibly high, and walking around like he’s just been dared to be in a movie. He dies early, and honestly, the movie loses its one honest-to-God pulse the moment he faceplants into a marble floor.
Emma, Alice, and Jordan round out the friend group, and I dare you to tell me which one is which. It’s like someone hit copy-paste on a sorority group chat and forgot to inject any humanity. One of them has a podcast. Another might be into another girl. One cries a lot. One gets high. All of them deliver lines like they’re trying to win a Most Ironic Use of the Word “Gaslight” award.
Their version of grief involves yelling, accusatory dancing, and killing each other’s vibe so hard you wish the hurricane would just finish them off already.
📱 The Dialogue: Cancel Me Now
“Your parents are upper-middle-class!”
“You’re silencing me!”
“You hate listen to my podcast!”
“You’re so toxic!”
It’s like the screenplay was written by a Twitter algorithm that only ingested tweets from people with anime avatars and emotional support water bottles. The dialogue is peppered with buzzwords that were already overused by the time this movie hit theaters. Gaslighting, trauma, trigger warnings—it’s all here, tossed around with the weight of a feather and the depth of a kiddie pool.
The film clearly wants to mock Gen Z’s hyper-woke, overanalyzed speech patterns, but it ends up indulging them so hard it feels like self-parody. It doesn’t critique the language—it drowns in it. Everyone talks like they’re live-streaming their own panic attacks, and not one word of it feels earned.
🔪 The Horror: Missing in Action
You’d think a slasher film set in a blackout during a hurricane would deliver some actual scares, but Bodies Bodies Bodiesis more interested in vibes than violence. Which is fine… until you realize the vibes suck.
Kills happen offscreen. The tension is DOA. Most of the film plays out like an improv exercise gone wrong, with characters wandering through dim hallways, yelling each other’s names, and accusing each other of things that happened two years ago at Coachella.
The closest we get to horror is the existential dread of being trapped in a house with people who say “hashtag blessed” unironically.
🤡 The Twist: Dumb and Dumber
I won’t spoil the ending (even though the movie does a fine job spoiling itself), but let’s just say the twist is so aggressively stupid it makes Scooby-Doo look like Seven. The big reveal is supposed to be ironic, but instead lands with all the impact of a balloon deflating in a nursing home.
You don’t walk away thinking, “Wow, what a clever subversion!” You walk away thinking, “That’s it? That’s what I wasted an hour and a half on?” It’s like the movie pranked you, and then asked for a round of applause.
🎭 Final Thoughts: Death by Dialogue
Bodies Bodies Bodies wants to be a satire, a thriller, and a horror film all in one—and it fails at all three. The satire is shallow, the thrills are nonexistent, and the horror is watching people talk over each other for 94 straight minutes.
It’s a film that thinks it’s holding a mirror up to Gen Z, but it’s really just projecting an Instagram story onto a pile of empty LaCroix cans. Everyone is insufferable, nothing is scary, and the only thing that dies convincingly is your will to keep watching.
The only body this movie actually buries is its own.
TL;DR
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Plot: Rich kids play a game. Then they scream until someone dies. Repeat.
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Characters: Hateable. Forgettable. All deserve therapy.
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Horror: More TikTok than terror.
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Dialogue: Written by an AI trained on Tumblr posts and passive-aggressive Slack messages.
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Ending: Makes you long for carbon monoxide poisoning.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 ironic glow sticks
Watch it if you’ve ever wanted to be murdered by dialogue and suffocated by vibes. Otherwise, go rewatch Scream and spare yourself the collective aneurysm.
