Bodies Bodies Bodies Parent Guide

Although Bee (Maria Bakalova) is a working class immigrant from Eastern Europe, her girlfriend Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) is from an exceptionally affluent family and has friends with similar backgrounds. So, when Sophie’s childhood best friend David (Pete Davidson) throws an outrageous and ill-advised “hurricane party” at his parents’ palatial home, Bee is a little nervous. Surrounded by opulence and Sophie’s wealthy friends, she doesn’t quite know how to fit in.

Social faux-pas and infighting become minor issues when Bee finds Pete outside in the storm, blood spraying from his neck, dead as a doornail. With the weather worsening, no cell phone reception, a complete power failure, and a murderer in their midst, these naïve twenty-somethings are going to be lucky to make it through the night alive – and that’s assuming that their fractious, toxic, and heartily unpleasant personal relationships don’t do them in first.

The story’s characters certainly live up to popular expectations of spoiled, irritating rich kids who grew up into spoiled, irritating young adults, obsessed with themselves and their cherry-picked online personas. The most irksome problem is that the dialogue sometimes sounds like it was written by a 40-year old who asked the nearest teenager for some buzzwords.

For most people, the biggest issue with the film will have more to do with the profanity, violence, sex, and drug use than with the characters. One hundred and ninety four f-bombs in 95 minutes may not be a record, but it is a mind-boggling amount of profanity to pack into a relatively short time frame. Some of that comes from the repetitively obscene lyrics to some of the music choices, but the vast majority comes from our verbose potential victims. Then there’s the gory murders, heavy drinking, cocaine use, and frequent sexual language. While this is marketed at older teens and young adults, I don’t know too many parents who would be wild about shipping their kid off to a film like this.

For all the production’s faults, Bodies Bodies Bodies seems to land well with its target audience – if the irritatingly loud laughter and poorly muffled commentary from the teens in the back of my theatre are anything to go by. If you can look past all that content, there’s a reasonably fun, funny, and well-thought-out mystery in here. But for parents, the negative content is a lot to overlook. I have to confess I had a passable time, even if I spent more time squinting at the swear count in my notebook than looking directly at the screen.