Plonk a handful of strung-out, cashed-up narcissists in a house and the carnage is basically guaranteed.
Lena Dunham's cult TV show Girls knew this well. In one of the series' most memorable episodes, its central quartet retreat to a secluded bungalow by the beach, ostensibly to patch up old wounds with a spot of salt air.
What ensues, of course, is nothing short of a bloodbath. Secrets tumble out before the first drink is downed; resentment spills over into all-out warfare. Every friendship leaves a little bruised.
That bloodbath becomes literal in Bodies Bodies Bodies, production studio A24's latest addition to its storied canon of glamorous delinquents: a slasher which takes the tried and true format of Dunham's episode and dials it to off-Richter levels. The wealthy are wealthier, the barbs pointier.
The bungalow is now a gargantuan McMansion – the old money kind, with gilded hallways and spiral staircases – and the characters are less likeable than ever before: loose-lipped layabouts with egos as inflated as their trust funds.
It makes for delicious viewing.
Dutch actor-turned-director Halina Reijn – helming her first English-language feature here – affords us but one moment of serenity before a 90-minute onslaught of blood, guts, and glow-in-the-dark wristbands.
We open on Sophie (Amandla Stenberg), fresh out of rehab, and new girlfriend Bee (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm's Maria Bakalova) canoodling in a field so dewy and verdant that it could only exist in a fairytale. There's even birdsong in the distance.
How long will this bliss last?
Approximately two minutes, as it turns out. It's interrupted by the incessant whoosh of iMessage notifications ringing out as the loved-up couple – who have been together all of six weeks – prepare for the getaway ahead.
"They're not as nihilistic as they look on the internet," Sophie soothes an unconvinced Bee, who is fretfully poring over the social feeds of everyone she's about to meet.
Her fears are hardly allayed when she faces them in person: a menagerie of the rich and fameless played by – thanks to A24's classically canny casting – Hollywood's bright young things, each plucked from buzzy breakout roles and given ensemble billing.
There's Rachel Sennott (Shiva Baby) as mouthy, melodramatic podcaster Alice, Chase Sui Wonders (Generation) as wannabe actor Emma, and Myha'la Herrold (Industry) as wily pot-stirrer Jordan – who, to complicate things, might just be an old flame of Sophie's.
That's not to mention the sideshow of boyfriends and hangers-on, including Pete Davidson essentially caricaturing himself, a gangly sleazeball pumped full of machismo, and the hulking Lee Pace as an impossibly Adonic anomaly amidst these twitchy 20-somethings.
Into the lion's den drops Bee, armed with a healthy dose of suspicion and a loaf of zucchini bread – an offering received with sidelong glances and slack-jawed stares.
But Reijn doesn't rest too long on the introductions. There's no time to waste, after all, when a hurricane is fast approaching, effectively confining them to the Cluedo mansion.
The jabs come thick and fast as the rain. "Love the podcast!" Sophie calls out to Alice – in a tone that implies she hates the podcast.
By nightfall, they're submerged in simmering tension that threatens to boil over. Call it cabin fever, or just the side effect of a decaying friendship strung together by little more than shared history.
The nerves are amped up by an inevitable round of the titular game – this group's version of what's better known as Mafia or Werewolf, where a secretly assigned killer goes around claiming unlucky victims, before everyone congregates to accuse one suspect.
It doesn't take a detective to figure out what happens next. Someone winds up (actually) dead, and as more bodies pile up, the paranoia surges, a flurry of fingers pointing in all directions. Is there a murderer on the loose? And, more importantly: is it one of them?
Both Reijn and screenwriter Sarah DeLappe have a stage background, and it shows: they trap their characters in an ever-shrinking chamber piece as the film's once-cavernous setting grows increasingly suffocating. Betrayal and intrigue reign.
The camera loosens into a beast of reckless abandon, sprinting and spinning through the claustrophobic bowels of the manor to giddy, sometimes nauseating effect. Often, Bodies Bodies Bodies makes good on its title, with a blur of unidentifiable limbs all that's visible on screen.
To its credit, it's a miracle we can see anything at all in a film set predominantly in the dark, especially given the recent epidemic of painfully low lighting and washed-out blobs in big-budget film and TV.
Bodies Bodies Bodies bucks the trend with a campy hyper-stylisation indebted – for better or for worse – to teen hit Euphoria: slivers of saturated neons, mesh tops and beaded necklaces, and a soundtrack practically cooked up in a lab for street cred, featuring pop provocateurs Charli XCX and Azealia Banks.
Much of its comedy, too, relies on the same pool of chronically online references. Its best – and blackest – one-liners belong to Sennott, whose spectacular brattiness draws from the kind of feverish lingo recognisable to anyone who has spent too much time on Twitter. Murder is toxic, backstabbing is gaslighting, and death is the ultimate silencing.
There are certainly choices – a plot point involving a viral TikTok song from 2020, for example, or one too many jokes about wi-fi – that risk coming across as dated, victims of the never-ending churn of the fad cycle that renders anything older than a week automatically geriatric.
The film, however, is too frenetic to let any isolated misfire linger. Its scatter-shot approach works in its favour, as does its complete and utter amorality: not a cringingly technophobic parable bemoaning the woes of social media à la Black Mirror, or a condescending Gen Z satire, but a character study of terrible people who feel all too familiar – with a few corpses in tow.
Like the hedonistic pleasure of eavesdropping on others' gossip, we can't help but submit to its delirium.
And when all is said and done, we might find ourselves experiencing that most elusive of feelings in the cinema: fun.
Bodies Bodies Bodies is in cinemas now.
