Bodies Bodies Bodies, a horror movie about how talking shit will kill your ass, is now on Netflix

Right here’s a very outdated method to suppose about a movie about very younger folks: Within the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus — please don’t go, I promise this will be humorous — feels compelled to speak about homicide. He says it’s dangerous (fairly uncontroversial) after which, as Jesus tales are wont to do, takes a wild left flip to say, “That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say, ‘Thou fool,’ shall be in danger of hell fire.”

This, I believe, can be the biblical origin of the phrase “talk shit, get hit.” Solely, it’s extra excessive than that. It’s extra like “talk shit, get got,” elevating unresolved animosity to the seriousness of homicide. Bodies Bodies Bodies is a very trendy expression of this sentiment. It’s a movie the place a bunch of pals who don’t truly like or know a lot about one another collect in a home, every of them an absolute strain cooker of gossip and unwell will, earlier than turning on one another as folks begin mysteriously dying. It’s type of a horror movie, nevertheless it’s largely very humorous.

Director Halina Reijn’s blunt however efficient social satire — issues get actually nasty when the Wi-Fi is out, Reijn notes in interviews — takes place in a single night time, as Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) brings her new girlfriend, Bee (Maria Bakalova), for a weekend with pals (together with Rachel Sennott, Pete Davidson, and Lee Tempo) in a large outdated home. What begins as a celebration recreation about homicide ends in precise homicide, and the whole lot everybody has been holding in opposition to one another instantly erupts to the floor because the assembled 20-somethings attempt to determine who is killing them.

What’s nice about Bodies Bodies Bodies isn’t essentially its plot or commentary, however the best way wherein it presents an up to date set of Agatha Christie-style archetypes drawn from lives lived on-line. The jokes come from how these archetypal characters talk (or don’t) with one another, as private emotions and failings are mediated or disguised by therapy-speak and the memetic bon mots. (The funniest joke includes a character’s star chart.)

As our reviewer famous when the movie premiered:

The filmmakers make the compelling option to ratchet up each the bloodshed and the absurdity in tandem. Relatively than letting satire give method to horror-movie pressure, they make the recriminations and defensiveness more and more louder and extra ridiculous because the characters really feel extra endangered. At one level, mortal peril is interrupted by the equally stunning betrayal that one buddy could also be hate-listening to a different’s podcast.

Bodies Bodies Bodies wasn’t a blockbuster by any means upon launch, garnering just shy of $14 million throughout its modest run. However a movie so transparently about how being on-line has disrupted our offline interactions is maybe greatest fitted to a streamer like Netflix, the place it may be endlessly seen, dissected, and memed by folks each in on the joke and woefully blind to it. Form of like Jesus.

Informed you it might be humorous.

Bodies Bodies Bodies is now streaming on Netflix.