Here’s a new twist on a classic genre: in the realm of the slasher horror, have we ever felt like everyone in the house, under the spectral threat of a killer in the shadows, truly deserved to get murdered, simply because they were all so deliciously insufferable? That is largely the conceit of Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, the new horror comedy from Dutch filmmaker Halina Rejin that lives up to the hype of its buzzy South By Southwest premiere earlier this year.
The film, Rejin’s sophomore feature, is naturally billed as a kind of teen or young adult slasher: a group of wealthy friends hide away in a mansion, before someone mysteriously begins to pick them off. But it is much less a thriller than it is mostly a bitingly funny satire of the equally nihilistic and self-absorbed ethos that our proverbial digital hellscape has left us with. An edited montage in the film’s trailer neatly sums up this portrait of social skewering here, as various characters indignantly parrot the language of an often wounded, self-pathologizing generation: you’re always gaslighting me; you fucking trigger me; you are so toxic; you’re silencing me!
