bottoms

In my review of Cocaine Bear earlier this year, I commented that you can’t simply will a cult film into existence - it’s an organic process, one which stems from developing your own esoteric wavelength and unapologetically putting the onus on viewers to find their way onto it. Bottoms, the new high school comedy from director Emma Seligman and co-writer Rachel Sennott is, if nothing, else a genuine cult film in-the-making; its particular idiosyncrasies are encoded deep within its cinematic marrow. It is not a creative frequency I was ultimately able to fully align with, personally, but still - game recognizes game. 

To be honest, I must have read and re-read the film’s tagline over a dozen times and I still have trouble making sense of it. Sennott (Bodies Bodies Bodies) and Ayo Edebiri (The Bear) star as PJ and Josie, best friends and sexually frustrated lesbians starting their senior year at Rockbridge Falls High. The girls are defined almost entirely by their queerness - there’s little insight into their aspirations, backgrounds or even the specifics of their friendship, beyond the driving need to get their rocks off (to be fair, that’s not unusual for the sex farce subgenre, but if we’re being honest, it’s not like the hetero versions were anything to aspire to much of the time). A random confluence of events leads to a rumor that the duo spent the summer bloodying their knuckles while incarcerated in juvie… and results in them starting what could best be described as a makeshift cross between a fight club and a female self-defense group - more or less by accident. But the unexpected spike in popularity that ensues puts PJ and Josie in sudden position to make a run at their objects of cheerleader affection (played by Kaia Gerber and Havana Rose Liu, respectively). 

The plot points in Bottoms are connected by such tenuous narrative tissue, it often feels as if the film were conceived by a glitchy AI program. The obvious point-of-reference - as is the case with virtually any outside-the-box high school comedy from the past 30 years - is the 1988 classic Heathers… but Seligman’s film has a fuzzier point-of-view. Its absurdist reality is tougher to buy into (“Could the ugly, untalented gays please report to the principal’s office?” we hear broadcast over the school’s PA system early on). There’s actually something tantalizingly clever at the core of the movie’s self-awareness, cloaking what’s essentially a queer American Pie in fake female empowerment (in addition to LGBTQ representation in the form of gay characters who behave just as selfishly as their straight counterparts). But Seligman’s reconceptualization of the genre struggles to take shape - it teeters between parody and homage (best exemplified by a needle drop of Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” as PJ and Josie mope through their “lowest point” character montage). Eventually Rockbridge’s football rivalry with Huntington High turns murderous and the film flies into such tonally bonkers territory, it’s hard to know how to react (it’s as if the third act of Heathers were stapled to a completely different movie). ​

It’s a good thing that Sennott and Edebiri are such marvelously expressive performers - almost Muppet-like in their emotive dexterity. The movie is very funny on a moment-to-moment basis… Seligman and Sennott’s dialogue has a pleasingly acidic Gen Z afterburn. Ruby Cruz (who portrayed a warrior-princess to very fine effect on Willow last year) gives a revelatory performance as PJ and Josie’s endearing, vulnerable, and underappreciated pal Hazel, while the movie is very nearly stolen by former NFL star Marshawn Lynch - the weirdest, most inspired casting decision of the summer as the club’s faculty advisor. Seligman has talent… but one hopes her visual sense gains a bit of stylistic musculature in time - the film’s flat, plastic look doesn’t necessarily do it any favors (it could have used a touch of aesthetic inspiration from a movie like Jawbreaker). There’s little doubt, however, that Bottoms - whatever its shortcomings - is going to amass some extremely devoted fans. As well it should. After all, we don’t watch movies for the sake of cinematic perfection, we watch them to find stories that resonate and characters who speak to us. And there are quite a few people, I expect, who will be sharply attuned to this zany oddity’s particular pitch.