“Bodies Bodies Bodies” (MA) half a star

IN an otherwise empty cinema, there was me in the back row and a pair of young adults several rows nearer the screen. 

As they passed me after the lights came back up, I asked what they thought about director Halina Reijn’s film of this story by Kristen Roupenian scripted by Sarah DeLappe. “Quite good”, the woman replied, followed by a brief agreement from her companion.

They asked me what I thought about it. In a George Washington cherry-tree moment, I had to reply that I disliked it intensely.

As its plot about a house party collapses into a pile of blood, party detritus and a quintet of dead bodies, the film’s vocabulary increasingly bespattering its dialogue becomes not so increasingly objectionable as unnecessary. 

I have no problems with women using the unprintable word in any or all of its grammatical possibilities. But here, that happens without the character thinking why she is doing it. She is angry. The reasons behind her anger don’t hold up.

As the film’s 94 minutes dragged on it became increasingly apparent that economising on lighting was important for the people in the back office waiting to see box-office cash start rolling in. As the plot about a game of murder reduces character numbers, the survivors wave handheld LED-torches to light the scene! 

I found nothing in the story that I could like or that impressed me about the techniques applied in its making. Am I becoming antique? Perhaps. And I wish I knew what that trio of creative minds wanted their production to tell the world. And why.

At all cinemas