
So many cool people, all here just to die
dir: Halina Reijn
2022
Hmm. Horror comedy about what paranoid and fragile simpletons contemporary too-online Gen Zs are… Sounds like a box office juggernaut…
I wonder at why people feel the urge to try to make generational statements about cohorts of people, unless it’s for the purposes of humour, in which case go for it. It’s just so lazy, and makes the people ‘making’ the statement seem like old reactionaries better placed to yell at clouds instead in their spare time.
I don’t really know what the motivations or impulses were for the people making this: I doubt it’s just a desire to get revenge on some group they despise. Though of course it’s still possible.
There isn’t really anything that specific about it that requires the people to be of a certain age in order to point out some of the annoying things people do these days. People of any age do them. And so this premise, of a bunch of paranoid people trapped in a mansion during a storm, as they slowly get picked off one by one, doesn’t really have anything that novel or witty to say about Insta or filters or identity politics or anything in fact: all it says is that in a harrowing situation, people will do dumb things.
And that’s okay. Instead of making this the kind of flick that would have starred, I dunno, Donald Sutherland, Jude Law, Angela Lansbury, Robert Mitchum, Joan Collins, Kylie Minogue and maybe a wrestler painstakingly working their way through the cast until And Then There Were None…, we have Pete Davidson.
What is a Pete Davidson? Well, he’s not quite a Dean Martin, and not quite a wrestler, but maybe he’s a twitchy meth head in between the two? His character of David doesn’t even own the house these people are partying in: It’s his parents’ mansion.
How emasculating. So he is a trust fund kiddie, and most of the rest of his friends are similarly trust fund kiddies. But only one of them has turned up to the party, with a newish girlfriend in tow, without actually being invited.
Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) has brought her girlfriend Bee (Maria Bakalova) to where neither of them is wanted, only to have the party go seriously south when a hurricane hits.
Ew, maybe they’re in Florida? How gross.
No, they’re not in Florida: Hurricanes happen everywhere now thanks to climate change. What’s important is that they’re trapped, they can’t get out, and most of them will be dead by dawn. That’s how these things work, that’s how they have to go. I don’t make the rules, I just abide by them like the drone that I am.
If there is something funny and interesting about what happens, it’s the how of it and the why.
Not necessarily as in “what is the killer or killers’ reason for offing all these over-privileged jerks” as in why did all this catastrophe ensue. Much like a hurricane, there are forces at work beyond our meagre ability to control them. Well, at least, there’s nothing to do now, whereas the time to act might have been decades ago, but that’s neither here nor there.
Bee, being an immigrant with a strong accent, is one of the first people they turn on when the bodies start hitting the floor. She doesn’t know any of these people, has an accent, and is also poor. Of course she’s going to be the prime suspect to these jerks. She feigns innocence, but, like most immigrants, she’s much tougher and more ruthless than she looks. And as bamboozled as she is by the social morays and tensions amongst these people, she has a strong will to survive.
Blaming the immigrant: so predictable, so American, so racist… And so successful. Who are the other likely suspects, well, there’s Greg (Lee Pace), who is someone’s Tinder date, and who is like twenty years older than everyone else. He has no real reason to be killing people (no-one really does), but the ageism on display, I mean, my god.
He did have an altercation with David, though, earlier in the night? Greg used some sports metaphor, and then David kept badgering him about his usage of the term, trying to imply Greg didn’t know what he was talking about. I mean, that’s not a good reason, but it’s definitely a reason to kill someone, don’t you think?
There’s also Alice (Rachel Sennott, who was so great in Shiva Baby from a couple of years ago), who is also a prime suspect only because she’s a podcaster.
Podcasters need content. Podcasters have to generate content. What better way to drum up interest in your true crime podcast than by murdering a bunch of people and then releasing a 12 episode series that doesn’t mention you knew you’d done it all along until the very end of the 12th episode?
That would make Ira Glass and fans of the Serial podcast very proud. Glad to see that Adnan Syed is now free, it’s about time, as long as, you know, he didn’t actually do it.
But that’s a different murder mystery. This is the one we’re dealing with right now. Instead of there being a long standing grudge, a desire for revenge or profit, the engine that’s moving this trail of bodies along is distrust, paranoia and a generalised resentment towards anyone who either uses buzzwords, feel that they’re being aggressed against, or when people don’t adhere closely enough to the new social niceties. In Sophie’s case she is a suspect, and on the outs with her former friends, because she hasn’t been responding quickly enough or frequently enough to the group chat. Also, she’s been avoiding partying with them lately because she’s a recovering addict, and whenever she parties with them, she relapses.
Just like she does this night. I mean, can you blame her? People are dying left right and centre, she dealing with all these microagressions, she has a new girlfriend interacting with these people, and I think maybe an ex-partner making moves on her? It would be enough to make me want to do drugs, and I’m not even a casual user.
One could not really blame the viewer from wanting to take drugs either while watching this, or at least drinking a lot. I watched this on a night I reserve for two things: having a bit of a drink after a long week of not doing much, and Thursday night is Horror night in my house.
That being said this is less of a horror flick, in fact it’s not really a horror flick at all, and more of a black comedy about how if you put a bunch of dingbats with fragile egos in an enclosed space for a short period of time, by morning most of them will be dead because they’ll all act out and do the dumbest things thinking it’s the only way to survive.
As it stands, the ending makes a glorious mockery of everything that came before it, and of every single one of these characters (however many survive, and I’m sorry to say it’s not a lot) and their sheer pettiness and selfishness. And that’s okay. It was plenty entertaining.
It’s not likely that I’m going to spend a lot of time thinking about the flick, but it’s clever and snide, and I will have something of a wry grin on my face whenever I think about the ending to this flick, and how many people a certain character kills for absolutely no good reason other than that it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Bodies Bodies Bodies. So many bodies hitting the floor.
7 times life is but a fragile thing, especially when your online friends come to cancel you in person out of 10
--
“They're not as nihilistic as they look on the internet. That's just what they want you to think.” - Bodies Bodies Bodies
- 641 reads