Bodies Bodies Bodies, now on Netflix, is Agatha Christie for the online age

Here’s a very old way of thinking about a film about very young people: In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus – please don’t go, I promise this will be funny – feels compelled to talk about murder. He says it’s bad (fairly uncontroversial) and then, as Jesus stories are wont to do, responds wild Turn to the left and say: “Whoever is angry with his brother without cause will face judgment; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ faces hellfire.”

I think that would be the biblical origin of the phrase “talk shit, get beaten.” Only it’s more extreme. It’s more like, “Talk shit, get it.” receive,”

elevate unresolved hostility to the seriousness of murder. Body, body, body is a very modern expression of this feeling. It’s a film in which a group of friends who actually don’t like each other or know much about each other gather in a house, each of them an absolute pressure cooker of gossip and ill-will, before attacking each other while people go on mysterious paths Way to start dying. It’s kind of a horror film, but mostly very funny.

Director Halina Reijn’s blunt but effective social satire – when the WiFi goes out, things get really bad, Reijn Notes in interviews – takes place in a single night when Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) brings her new friend Bee (Maria Bakalova) to a big old house for a weekend with friends (including Rachel Sennott, Pete Davidson and Lee Pace). What starts as a party game about murder ends in actual murder, and everything everyone has brought against each other immediately comes to the surface as the assembled 20-somethings try to find out who’s killing them.

What’s great about it? Body, body, body isn’t necessarily the plot or commentary, but the way it presents an updated set of Agatha Christie-style archetypes drawn from lives lived online. The jokes come from how these archetypal characters communicate (or don’t) with each other, conveying or disguising personal feelings and flaws Therapy speaking and the memetic bon mots. (The funniest joke involves a character’s star chart.)

As our reviewer noted at the film’s premiere:

The filmmakers make the compelling decision to ramp up both the bloodshed and the absurdity at the same time. Instead of letting the satire give way to the tension of a horror film, they make the accusations and defensiveness louder and more ridiculous the more the characters feel endangered. At one point, the threat to life is interrupted by the equally shocking betrayal of one friend listening to another’s podcast, possibly hatefully.

Body, body, body was by no means a blockbuster upon release almost 14 million dollars during its humble run. But a film that is so transparent about how being online has disrupted our offline interactions is perhaps best suited to a streamer like Netflix, where it can be watched endlessly, dissected and saved by people who are both in on the joke are involved and are completely ignorant about it. A bit like Jesus.

I told you it would be funny.

Body, body, body is now streaming on Netflix.