The writers of this need to cleanse the Scream franchise ASAP.
As someone born around the very dawn of the 21st century, I can attest that it’s very easy for our generation to feel as if the world is working against us. We’ve become conditioned to treat every social interaction, online debate, etc. as transactions set in a hostile, constantly judgmental environment. In doing so, we cover-up behind stereotypes that the world has deemed most popularly the “correct” ways to be and think, and throw ignominious new ones out to those whose ideologies clash with them. But why do we do it? Because it’s easier to act like the victim, to not take the blame, to, if the time comes, have the advantage via your current resume that understands the “formula of the year” best based on what’s been broadcasted over the media and spread between peers who want you to only agree with them and literally nothing else. We rather have weapons up our sleeves at all times than a voice that comes from the heart given how competitive America has become, even if it means other people’s livelihood, whether truly guilty or not, will drop in the process.
While not done uber-thoroughly, Bodies Bodies Bodies allegorizes this through both horror and satire. An example of this can be perceived in Halina Reijn’s strong use of simple handheld claustrophobic shots and a damp, impressively near pitch-black-lit setting (our judgment is blind, get it???) occasionally supported by thin, artificial neon glowsticks (our judgment is sensationalized and simplified get it???). The performances aren’t supported by MCU quirk-quippy dialogue like you often see polluted in young horror movie characters today, but rather by constant self-absorbed cringiness, making the social climate it’s inflating have not only a negative, impulsive, chaotic, and frightening presence, but also a frankly obnoxious and embarrassing one at that — for the better! The film had a personal thesis and furthermore a way to showcase it via an underrated brand of horror: BEING HIGH ASF DURING A CRISIS.
I’m also assuming that Rachel Sennott is going to continue carrying her, I guess, “anxiety-driven cinema” curse from film to film. Good!
Between this and X, the slasher genre might get the revival it alas deserves for which straightly-sold-as “modern reboots” just aren’t warranting. I’m tired of those movies advertising themselves as “*well-known thirty / forty-year-old title* for a new generation” despite them all being preoccupied with how perfect their creator was by literally just unproductively copying it, professing the deed as “paying tribute”, and bargaining little modernization besides the given of digital age filmmaking tactics and obviously a new time period that it has to establish by those same Gen-X writers who rather linger over the past than open up to the new generation which they’re required to hastily write about because we’re, by default, living in different times. If anything, Bodies Bodies Bodies is John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) for Gen-Z, but it doesn’t have to pretend like it’s so directly related because the filmmakers are clearly confident enough in their own re-envisioning as opposed to so many big-shot Hollywood writers today.
Verdict: B
“Bodies Bodies Bodies” is now playing in theaters.
Burning the Celluloid 
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