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”.
Still, they’ve developed life-consuming crushes on cheerleaders Brittany (Kaia Gerber) and Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), despite the latter being in one of those prom king-and-queen relationships with the star quarterback, Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine). And, somehow, they stumble into the kind of gigantic lie that only happens in John Hughes movies: hoping to woo Brittany and Isabel, they found an after-school, all-female fight club.
While Shiva Baby – about a young woman who encounters both her ex and her sugar daddy at a family function – struck unnervingly close to home with its social dynamics, Bottoms attempts the opposite. History class lasts only for a minute or two, enough time to initiate a brawl over the Treaty of Versailles. There’s also always a guy in a cage at the back of the classroom, for a reason that only becomes clear after you’ve simply accepted it and moved on. Real-life friends Sennott and Edebiri are harmonious in ways that relieve them of the need to land flat-out punchlines. Instead, they just sweat funny out of their pores.
They play PJ and Josie as lowercase nerds whose awkwardness stems from the fact they’ll say literally anything to fill the silence, even if it’s the phrase “my dad left me and I’m still incredibly punctual”. There are some stellar supporting turns, too. Galitzine goes for a himbo hysteria that would make him an ideal companion for Ryan Gosling’s Ken, while former NFL running back Marshawn Lynch plays a teacher who’s truly given up.
There’s also something casually subversive, or at least incredibly up-to-date, about the way Seligman and Sennott’s script broaches the way people actually talk about feminism in the year 2023. Everyone’s been taught the buzzwords, but still has no idea how to apply them to real life. When the meekest of the group, Hazel (Ruby Cruz), suggests the club might offer a “safe space”, PJ immediately starts asking members to share the deepest traumas – you know, as an icebreaker.
But despite the performative feminism, and beyond the black eyes and broken noses, the girls still work naturally towards clique-defying female solidarity. It’s the small, sincere thought behind the joke: you don’t have to master the theory to know that women are stronger together.
Dir: Emma Seligman. Starring: Rachel Sennott, Ayo Edebiri, Ruby Cruz, Havana Rose Liu, Kaia Gerber, Nicholas Galitzine, Marshawn Lynch. 15, 91 minutes.
‘Bottoms’ is in cinemas from 3 November
