In “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” a group of rich kids — five old friends, along with a couple of not-so-significant others — gather for a hurricane party at the pastoral suburban mansion of o…
, from “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”) show up to find the others lounging in the pool, the perky hostility commences. The characters get in each other’s faces, and the movie gets in our face; much of it is shot in close-up, in the semi-darkness , with the storm raging outside, so that the audience feels like it’s part of the pressure cooker.
Yet “Bodies Bodies Bodies” also has a fast and witty aggro tone. David, whose parents own the house, is played bywith a black eye that makes him look like a panda, and as soon as you’ve got Pete Davidson in your movie, doing that thing he does , you’re cueing the audience to treat everything that’s happening as a lark.
Not far into the evening, the characters decide to play the game in which you “kill” someone by touching them, and everyone has to figure out who the killer is. When they’re all in the living room, trying to name this or that person as the killer, the tension ratchets up. They’re taking this very seriously! They all seem to know each other’s secrets, and after it’s revealed that one character’s romantic relationship is riddled with a sexual problem, the character stalks off in a huff.
Whodunnit? We have no idea, but the implication is that it’s one of the people on hand. For years, the whole youth-slasher-movie paradigm — first this kid gets killed off, then that kid, then this kid — has been traced back to the murder-mystery form invented by Agatha Christie in “And Then There Were None.
“Bodies Bodies Bodies” is Halina Reijn’s second feature, but she’s a veteran actor who stages the movie as a freewheeling actors’ banquet. She’s working from a script, by Sarah Delappe, that lays out the relationships like something in a diagram, but the dialogue is blade-sharp. There’s a message buried somewhere in all this — about how today’s twentysomethings are too obsessed with knocking down the demons they create, often out of thin air. Yet it’s not like the movie doesn’t revel in that.