If you're feeling lost among Netflix's many, many options for something to watch, how about a short and sharp horror movie with a knowing and meta edge? Bodies Bodies Bodies is a funny, intense, 95-minute ride with a group of friends who start falling apart rapidly once they start dying over the course of an ill-fated party.
The cast of pals – including Oscar-nominee Maria Bakalova, Rachel Sennott and Lee Pace – have all come to a big empty house to intentionally trap themselves there for a 'Hurricane party'. They've brought booze, food, surprise dates, and a ton of baggage from the complex relationships that have with each other these days.
It doesn't take long for them to start needling each other, and things really take a turn when one of them turns up dead with their throat slashed. Accusations fly, sides are formed, more people die, the sides immediately break down… with its self-aware humor, it's like Scream meets an Agatha Christie mystery, with a particularly sharp sense of humor about its Gen Z protagonists and modern-day 'toxic' friendships.
I had an absolute ball watching it, especially the always-fantastic Rachel Sennott as a force for near-total chaos in this movie, and Amandla Stenberg as someone who starts as your trustworthy anchor into this friend group, but who you won't know what to think about as the night goes on.
But what I really liked about Bodies Bodies Bodies was how it feels like you're watching a 2020s version of the original Scream for much of it, but actually that's not the kind of horror movie it is at all, as the ending makes clear. People who don't want spoilers should finish here, but for anyone who's seen it or doesn't mind, I'll talk a little more about what I like about how the movie turns out.
SPOILERS FROM HERE
The moment I got really fond of Bodies Bodies Bodies is when I realised it wasn't a riff on Scream, it's a riff on The Thing. It's a movie about people trapped in a location 'knowing' any one of them could be a killer, and completely unable to trust each other. Like The Thing, a crucial part is that the death isn't bringing out anything that wasn't already there – these people were primed to start throttling each other, but (just about) managed to conceal it, and the first death is the spark that was always destined to start a fire.
When you know this, the final reveal at the end is as important as it is inevitable: there is no murderer. The first death was a freak accident, but this group had so little trust left in each other despite their protestations of love that they immediately believed each other to be murderers, and were happy to immediately start killing each other to defend against this hypothetical slasher.
It may not be for everyone, and I probably wouldn't put it on our list of the best Netflix movies, but I thought it was great fun, and given that The Thing is one of my favorite movies of all time, I loved seeing its core concepts translated from being particularly about caged and simmering masculine resentment to a dominantly female friend group – and a group of young adults rather than middle-aged men, for a spin on it that felt truly fresh to me.
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