In the smirky, squirmy comic freakout “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” a bunch of rich, horny 20-somethings throw a party during a hurricane, only to find themselves trapped in a bloody charnel house of horrors.
“This is not a safe space,” quips the tagline; presumably “Haha, get it?” didn’t fit on the one-sheet. Thoroughly taken with its own antic almost-cleverness, the movie is a grisly post-millennial whodunit, graced with actors who are reliably good whether they’re being slashed, bludgeoned or reduced to cheap satirical punchlines. The most revealingly ugly scene finds a handful of surviving characters clinging to some of the Extremely Online generation’s more obnoxious social media pieties: “I’m an ally!” “Feelings are facts!” “A podcast is a lot of work!”
OK, that last one is kind of funny. You could say something similar about “Bodies Bodies Bodies”: It’s kind of funny and kind of scary, if ultimately neither funny nor scary enough to keep the two modes from canceling each other out. The director Halina Reijn (“Instinct”), working from a script by the playwright Sarah DeLappe (itself drawn from a story by Kristen Roupenian), is trying to pull off something appreciably ambitious here: the nihilistic crowd-pleaser, the cynically tossed-off generational statement, the evisceration of insufferably vapid characters that somehow avoids tilting into its own insufferable vapidity. She’s also bent on making a smart, crafty genre picture that will keep you guessing, laughing and screaming simultaneously — and this, too, proves its own devilishly tricky proposition.
