This film made me feel very old. Clearly I am not the target demographic. I have no problem with the fact that it opens with a long closeup of a deep, slobbery same-sex kiss (although, as usual, I could do without the sound effects), but the music that runs constantly through it - do the kids really listen to that? Anyway, I have to say that this is a smartly written, very well-acted clever little number that is nonetheless very slight. It would make a pretty much perfect Twilight Zone episode. The essential plot is that the kissing pair we open on
are on their way to a hurricane party at a very fancy mansion, empty of responsible adults, and owned by David (Pete Davidson) (or more precisely, his parents). One of our couple, Sophie, knows David from way back but has vanished from his life recently to go to rehab. She knows about the party from a group text, but it's clear David wasn't expecting her and isn't exactly thrilled to see her. Some of the others are, in particular, Alice, a ditzy podcaster, who has brought a much older (late 30s? Early 40s?) boyfriend (Greg) along. David's girlfriend Emma, an actress (who has recently been in Hedda Gabler, we find out later in conversation) doesn't seem bothered, but Jordan, a cool-to-the-point of surly type, and an ex-girlfriend of Sophie's, is openly confrontational. None of them know the other member of the couple, Bee, who is an outsider in every respect - poor and a recent Eastern European immigrant (the others assume Russia but she doesn't come from Moscow (Emma asks because her favorite film is Dr. Zhivago, which is odd for her Gen-Z cohort, but makes sense for an aspiring actress) and in fact Bee is played by the Bulgarian actress who made a splash as Borat's "daughter" in the film where Rudy Giuliani seemed to think he was about to have sex with her). Drugs are taken, bickering happens, flirting happens and then the game begins. This is the titular "Bodies Bodies Bodies," which involves everyone picking scraps of paper from a pile, one of which has an X on it, and that person is the "murderer"; then the lights go out, everybody crawls around until a shout of "bodies bodies bodies" rings out, which means that somebody has been "murdered" (by being touched on the back by the murderer), whereupon the lights go on, the "corpse" has to lie there to be found, and then everyone tries to work out whodunnit. The victim is Greg, and at first it looks like he's actually dead, which of course would be a bit of a movie cliche, but a beer bottle to the testicles from David (who is a convincingly realistic asshole, who nonetheless speaks more truth than falsehoods) jerks him into life. David is in a foul mood (he's coked up and has been called an "incel" by Sophie) and taunts the apparently passive and a bit simple Greg to the point when he looks like he's about to hit him but then goes to bed. Everyone fingers David as the killer despite his protestations that it's Emma, until he throws a little shitfit and storms off. No, the real film starts shortly thereafter when Bee, who has had more drugs than she's used to, is off in the kitchen and witnesses David appearing at the storm-lashed window and slumping down covered in blood. The rest arrive in a hurry and find that David has had his throat cut (by his father's sword, that Greg had earlier annoyed him with by performing the "chop the top off the champagne bottle" trick). From that moment on, the paranoia and panic is constant as a dwindling group of our very flawed protagonists wander around, lit only by their cellphones (and in Alice's case, by her glow-stick bangles)
as the storm kills the power, and Bee left a light on in the one car and drained the battery. Accusations fly, truths are revealed, mistakes are made (for example, over the meaning of "vet" as in Greg's status) until the end, where the film elevates itself nicely with a very clever denouement that we did not see coming. (Well, we sort of guessed the outlines, but the reveal is done well.) As I said, clever but slight, but with some definite laugh-out-loud moments (and not too much gore for the faint of heart).
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