Bodies Bodies Bodies film review — Gen Zers turn on each other in house of horrors

If this week’s new Pinocchio film sees Disney target Generation Alpha (under 12s), eternally modish studio A24 keeps hunting the Gen Z dollar with bloody comic ensemble piece Bodies Bodies Bodies. The title could hint at either sex or death, and both end up with roles to play in a movie carefully stuffed with rising stars du jour.

Among the headliners are Rachel Sennott, lead of 2020 sleeper hit Shiva Baby, and Maria Bakalova, last seen in the company of Rudy Giuliani in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. But the biggest names are Amandla Stenberg and deadpan man-child Pete Davidson, the latter cast as a feckless rich kid with a country house devoid of parents and a friendship group come to stay.

The set-up suggests horror. Sure enough, a corpse is soon produced, followed by wild accusations and power cuts. (The cast huddle round the lights of their iPhones.) But if olds like me are put in mind of Scream, the new movie has none of that film’s nitpicking obsession with movies themselves. Instead, it mines a seam of bitter rivalries, secret affairs and ugly grudges among the young and beautiful, all played for giggles.

Much of the movie is not unwitty. Still, actual young people may smell a rat in a film packed with mocking references to triggering and toxicity, the stuff of a million digs at twentysomething “snowflakes”. The movie captures a generation all right, but perhaps not the one the makers intended. Sure enough, a creative team including director Halina Reijn and original story writer Kristen Roupenian (author of the celebrated short story Cat Person) prove, like the A24 higher-ups, to all be on the dustier side of 40. How’s that for a sting in the tail?

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from September 9