Bodies Bodies Bodies

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.
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