91 min | R | August 25, 2023 | Orion Pictures
Two unpopular queer best friends start a self-defense club at their football-obsessed high school. The real goal is hooking up with cheerleaders. The fists fly, the blood spills, and nobody learns a single lesson worth keeping.
PJ and Josie are seniors who want two things. They want to sleep with the popular cheerleaders. They also want, for one minute, to be seen. So they invent a story that they spent the summer in juvie and launch a fight club disguised as a feminist empowerment group. Emma Seligman builds a high-school comedy that runs entirely on horniness and bad faith, then dares the audience to keep rooting for two girls who are lying to everyone around them.
Rachel Sennott plays PJ as a motor that never stops. She talks fast, schemes faster, and never once questions whether the scheme is a good idea. Ayo Edebiri plays Josie as the conscience who keeps getting talked out of having one. Edebiri does the most with the smallest gestures, letting panic flicker across her face while her mouth agrees to the next terrible plan. Ruby Cruz plays Hazel with a deadpan loyalty that grounds the chaos, and Marshawn Lynch wanders through as Mr. G, the teacher advisor who could not care less, delivering non-advice with total commitment.
Seligman and Sennott write the script as deliberate cartoon. The film exists in a heightened world where the football team wears jerseys to class and a rival school plots actual murder. Seligman shoots the fight-club scenes with real impact, letting punches connect and noses break, so the violence stays funny and ugly at the same time. The production design pushes the school into a candy-colored unreality that makes the bloodshed land harder against it. The tonal control is the whole trick. The movie commits to its own absurd logic and never blinks.
This is a comedy about wanting something so badly that you stop caring who you hurt to get it. Seligman refuses to soften PJ and Josie into role models. They are selfish and cowardly and occasionally cruel, and the film likes them anyway. The satire of empowerment language is sharp because the girls weaponize it without believing a word. The film is small and loud and mean in the right way, and it ends before it can wear out the joke.