“Bodies Bodies Bodies:” Gen Z is Killing It (No, For Real)

NAB

Lord of the Flies meets Mean Girls is how director Halina Reijn describes her slasher-comedy-satire Bodies Bodies Bodies.

article here

“There’s violence, blood, and deaths but I’m just interested in these young people [who are] locked up in a house without WiFi,” she tells Script Magazine. “What do they do when faced with that scenario? Are we civilized? Or are we animals? We think we are all smart and civilized and intellectual, but then something happens and we become these weird junkies.”

Released by A24, the film follows a group of wealthy 20-somethings as they decide to hunker down during a hurricane while subsisting on alcohol, drugs, and drama. All horror breaks loose for the partying Gen Z tribe (a stacked cast featuring Maria Bakalova, Amandla Stenberg, Rachel Sennott, Lee Pace, Chase Sui Wonders and Pete Davidson) when the storm cuts off all mobile and WiFi comms forcing the group to play a parlor game ‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’ that turns deadly.

Reijn says the film’s undercurrents of social commentary were by design — and entirely the point.

“This film I made [is] because I'm completely and utterly addicted to my phone,” Reijn told NYLON.

“I'm just addicted to my screen, I'm addicted to all the social media and all the narcissism and … I'm just revolted by myself. I thought, I want to make a fun film that sort of is a comment on the time that we live in, and the way we communicate.”

She added: “We all know there's so much shit going on right now, but at the same time we're like, ‘Oh, well let's see who posted what today.’ In the face of war, in the face of abortion being banned. Of course, my film is a very light comedy, but I wanted that dark undertone of making a cautionary tale about how we are glued to that and the sort of narcissism of our times.”

This is Reijn’s second feature after 2019 psychological thriller Instinct, on the strength of which she was hand picked by A24.

“I was immediately intrigued, because I have a very tight friend group,” she relates on being sent Kristen Roupenian’s original script. “I don't have children. My friends are my family. And they always like to play a game called Mafia or Werewolf, or we call it Murderer. I loved it and I also hated it because I always was afraid. These games are mind games, and they basically provoke sort of a psychological warfare, if you will. And within a friend group, that's super scary. You're basically trying to find out who's lying.”

Nonetheless she adapted it to make it “more of my own.. because it would be the first project that didn't come from my own brain” and rewrote it with Sarah DeLappe, a theater writer from New York, adding in more humor.

“Sarah and I edited this together… so that all of those characters in the movie are, for me personally, versions of myself and all of those relationships are all drawn from moments of my own life and Sarah’s life,” she explained to Scriptmag. “There’s a lot of things in the film that are private references for me and you just mix-it it up like a cocktail and throw it on the screen.”

Reijn sees a particular connection between the game and the culture of Gen Z. “Especially for this generation, we're all acting. We're all growing up in front of a camera,” she elaborates in the film’s production notes. “The game they play in the film is to catch the actor—you know, ‘is she acting,’ ‘what's real and what's not real?’ In some ways, the film is about the struggle to be truly intimate while being glued to our phones. We’re so used to trying to present a better version of ourselves online, and the question is who we are without that.”

She rehearsed the cast to film in lengthy takes in the movie’s single location – an empty McMansion-style estate in an exclusive enclave in Upstate New York that convincingly reflected the high-income demographics of most of the characters in the story.

Dutch DoP Jasper Wolf (who shot Instinct) employs a mostly handheld style weaving close to the actors with extremely minimal lighting to convey the realism of being in a cavernous house without electricity. He experimented with colored flashlights, LED lights, iPhones, glowsticks, and emergency lights to differentiate between characters so they could stand out during chaotic action scenes. This also meant that the actors had to move the lights to illuminate their faces or those of other actors at the right moments.

Reijn explained, “We wanted the shoot to be very real and didn’t want to work with artificial lighting at all.” Because the [actors are] already focusing on their acting and then they have to also light their own faces as they move and speak. The darkness drew everyone closer together and made this limitation a very creative solution.”

A24 has always excelled with its explorations of youth culture and social media, be it with 2013’s Spring Breakers, 2018’s Eighth Grade, or last year’s Zola. Yet Bodies Bodies Bodies, “might be the most prescient, biting, and downright fun of A24’s dissections of Gen Z culture so far,” finds Collider.

Wired calls it “a TikTok-fueled whirlwind of Pete Davidson riffs, podcast jokes, and arguments over who’s triggered and who’s being gaslit.”

“All this mayhem never really adds up to much,” finds AV Club as if calling out Gen Z for the folly of their well-intentioned faults was enough. And yet, it is enough, thanks to the film’s very game and hard-working cast.”