Right here’s a really outdated method to consider a film about very younger folks: Within the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus — please don’t go, I promise this shall be humorous — feels compelled to speak about homicide. He says it’s dangerous (fairly uncontroversial) after which, as Jesus tales are wont to do, takes a wild left flip to say, “That whosoever is offended together with his brother with no trigger shall be at risk of the judgment: and whosoever shall say, ‘Thou idiot,’ shall be at risk of hell hearth.”
This, I feel, can be the biblical origin of the phrase “discuss shit, get hit.” Solely, it’s extra excessive than that. It’s extra like “discuss shit, get acquired,” elevating unresolved animosity to the seriousness of homicide. Our bodies Our bodies Our bodies is a really fashionable expression of this sentiment. It’s a film the place a bunch of associates who don’t really like or know a lot about one another collect in a home, every of them an absolute strain cooker of gossip and unwell will, earlier than turning on one another as folks begin mysteriously dying. It’s sort of a horror film, however it’s largely very humorous.
Director Halina Reijn’s blunt however efficient social satire — issues get actually nasty when the Wi-Fi is out, Reijn notes in interviews — takes place in a single night time, as Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) brings her new girlfriend, Bee (Maria Bakalova), for a weekend with associates (together with Rachel Sennott, Pete Davidson, and Lee Tempo) in an enormous outdated home. What begins as a celebration recreation about homicide leads to precise homicide, and every thing everybody has been holding towards one another instantly erupts to the floor because the assembled 20-somethings strive to determine who’s killing them.
What’s nice about Our bodies Our bodies Our bodies isn’t essentially its plot or commentary, however the way in which by which it presents an up to date set of Agatha Christie-style archetypes drawn from lives lived on-line. The jokes come from how these archetypal characters talk (or don’t) with one another, as private emotions and failings are mediated or disguised by therapy-speak and the memetic bon mots. (The funniest joke entails a personality’s star chart.)
As our reviewer famous when the movie premiered:
The filmmakers make the compelling option to ratchet up each the bloodshed and the absurdity in tandem. Reasonably than letting satire give method to horror-movie pressure, they make the recriminations and defensiveness more and more louder and extra ridiculous because the characters really feel extra endangered. At one level, mortal peril is interrupted by the equally stunning betrayal that one pal could also be hate-listening to a different’s podcast.
Our bodies Our bodies Our bodies wasn’t a blockbuster by any means upon launch, garnering simply shy of $14 million throughout its modest run. However a film so transparently about how being on-line has disrupted our offline interactions is maybe finest fitted to a streamer like Netflix, the place it may be endlessly seen, dissected, and memed by folks each in on the joke and woefully unaware of it. Type of like Jesus.
Instructed you it will be humorous.
Our bodies Our bodies Our bodies is now streaming on Netflix.