Bodies Bodies Bodies

Directed by Halina Reijn, Bodies Bodies Bodies follows a group of friends, including Amandla Stenberg’s Sophie, Rachel Sennott’s Alice, and Pete Davidson’s David, as they’re forced to fend for their lives after a party game goes horribly awry. Filmmaker Reijn, armed with Sarah DeLappe’s screenplay, delivers a progressively tedious slasher that strikes all the wrong notes virtually from the word go, as the movie kicks off with an underwhelming opening stretch that’s compounded by the almost total absence of compelling, sympathetic characters – with the various performers trapped within the confines of laughably stereotypical, hopelessly one-dimensional figures. (These people, for the most part, spout dialogue that seems comprised solely of eye-rolling Millennial clichés.) The picture’s arms-length atmosphere is compounded (and perpetuated) by a repetitive and dimly-lit midsection in which hardly anything of interest occurs (ie there’s just so much hiding and stumbling around in the dark), and while the climactic reveal is admittedly pretty decent (and one can’t help but wish it were in a much, much better movie), Bodies Bodies Bodies has long-since cemented its place as a fairly worthless piece of work that feels considerably longer than its 94 minutes.

* out of ****