94 min | R | August 5, 2022 | A24
Rich twenty-somethings ride out a hurricane in a family mansion and play a party game where one of them pretends to be a killer. Then a real body turns up and nobody stops playing. The phones still have signal, and that is the scariest part.
A group of rich twenty-somethings gathers at a remote family mansion as a hurricane bears down. They pass the night playing a party game called Bodies Bodies Bodies, where one player is the secret killer and the rest hunt for the culprit. Then the power fails and a real corpse turns up. The game’s logic of accusation bleeds into the dark, and the friends turn on each other. The murder mystery is a delivery system for something sharper. The real subject is a generation that weaponizes the language of therapy and grievance against the people closest to it.
Amandla Stenberg plays Sophie as a newly sober addict whose fragility curdles into manipulation when the group turns on her. Maria Bakalova plays her girlfriend Bee as the outsider, watching the coded warfare and trying to read the alliances. Rachel Sennott steals the film as Alice, a podcaster who narrates her own victimhood in breathless run-on monologues. Myha’la gives Jordan a watchful jealousy as Sophie’s former flame, and Chase Sui Wonders plays Emma, an actress whose performance never stops. Pete Davidson plays David with the entitled menace of a man who has never been told no. Lee Pace plays Greg, the older date who wandered into a war he does not understand.
Halina Reijn directs from a screenplay by Sarah DeLappe, working from a story by Kristen Roupenian. Once the power dies, Reijn shoots almost the entire film by phone flashlight and the green wash of glow sticks. The choice is more than a gimmick. Faces drop in and out of darkness, and the audience loses track of who stands where, which mirrors the characters’ collapsing trust. DeLappe’s dialogue lands the satire, stacking buzzwords like gaslighting and triggering until they mean nothing. The horror and the comedy share one engine, which is people who cannot stop talking even as they die.
The film works best as a comedy of manners with a body count. The whodunit machinery stays thin, and the resolution leans on a punchline more than a revelation. That is the point and also the limit. These characters are designed to grate, and spending the night with them tests patience as much as it rewards it. Reijn understands that the scariest thing in the house is not the killer. It is a group of people who have never faced a consequence and now face several.