In the event that your friend is killed, the rational thing to do is take a deep breath, a step back and think logically to find the culprit.
In entertainment company A24’s “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” however, mass panic and hysteria ensues as the house becomes a real-life version of the meeting zone in the popular online game “Among Us.”
The film stars Maria Bakalova, Amandla Stenberg, Rachel Sennott, Chase Sui Wonders, Lee Pace, Myha'la Herrold and Pete Davidson as a group of wealthy 20-somethings parading around as social media influencers.
After a party game gets deadly, the filters fly off and backstabbers, fake friends and ugly truths are uncovered.
As a millenial nearing her 30s, the dry and ridiculous Gen Z humor was entertaining, though sometimes curt, leaving me baffled and asking myself, “did that really just happen?” before laughing at the second-hand social awkwardness.
The film pokes fun at Gen Z while also making it its target demographic with its humor. It’s a hard thing to pull off successfully, but it triumphs in mirroring the absurdity of the deadly situation at hand with the group's whacky responses.
After showing up unannounced at David’s (Davidson), house for a hurricane party, Sophie (Stenberg) introduces her new girlfriend Bee (Bakalova), to Rachal (Sennott), Emma (Wonders), Jordan (Herrold) and Alice’s Tinder-match Greg, a 40-something Gen X and immediate group outlier.
Everyone begins to cut loose as the night continues. Water and alcohol bottles litter the top of every flat surface, the music kicks up and everyone raves about social media likes on their phones.
The group then decides to play “Bodies, Bodies, Bodies,” a game where one person is picked to be the killer while the rest tries to figure out who it is and vote them out. After the power is cut down from the hurricane, the game turns real as bodies start to pile up.
The film makes genuine points about how we will often believe subjective feelings to be facts, instead of relying on the evidence to come to rational conclusions. Instead, the group’s fear ultimately drives many of them to their demise.
Feelings are not facts, facts are facts.
The game had influenced each character into casting the blame on others in the group; be it the single white male, the rehabilitated drug addict or the one who constantly plays the victim.
Society has been so enveloped in various media that sometimes it's hard for younger generations to separate themselves from the dramatic entertainment content they see online to real life.
The film’s overuse of buzzwords including toxic, gaslighting, trigger and nihilistic exemplifies the internet’s influence on each character.
The dialogue feels like it's been ripped straight from a self-help YouTube video: available to everyone everywhere at any time but lacks sustenance and definition the more it's done.
“I think Gen Z has a brilliant, brilliant way of latching onto words, giving them so much beautiful meaning and having it spread like wildfire across cultures and then have it swallowed by irony,” said Wonders in an Aug. 11 interview with The New York Times.
TV shows including “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina'' and movies including “Not Okay'' take the Gen Z mindset and libral agenda to extremes which leads to the message being thrown at its audience so often that it means absolutely nothing.
“Bodies Bodies Bodies” takes full advantage of that mindset and reveals the absurdity of actionless language.
The film jabs and stabs at its horror-fanatic audience, knowing full well that figuring out the twist at the end of every “whodunit” scenario is what keeps fans dying for more (pun intended).
