Bottoms, in my mind, takes place in the same universe as 1989’s deliciously nasty Heathers, a film in which the mean girls ask people to “f*** me gently with a chainsaw”, before chugging cups of drain cleaner because bad boy Christian Slater dared them to. It’s our reality refracted through several layers of dissociative teen angst, where a full-blown apocalypse can be contained within the cast concrete walls of an American high school.
Bottoms is hardly as dark or as morbid as Heathers (although the two films do share an unexpected, explosive commonality) but it’s just as cynical, cool, and hysterically weird. The tone is a little more anxious, too, with a script written by director Emma Seligman and star Rachel Sennott, a pair who previously collaborated on the 2021 black comedy Shiva Baby. Sennott plays PJ, with The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri as Josie – best friends and lesbians who have found themselves at the bottom of the social order, not because they’re gay (the school, overall, seems fairly progressive) but because, to quote, they’re “gay, untalented, and ugly”.
