If you like your high school comedies extra bloody you’ll adore how Bottoms fights deliriously dirty
Bottoms. // Courtesy Orion Pictures
Let this serve as a warning up top: Don’t go into Bottoms expecting it to be anything like co-writer/director Emma Seligman and co-writer/star Rachel Sennott’s last pairing, the hysterical, cringe-inducing Shiva Baby. It’s a very different movie. Where Shiva Baby was claustrophobic and anxious, Bottoms is open, loose and goofy. Where Shiva Baby was painfully relatable, Bottoms feels like a heightened, satirical approximation of a high school comedy.
This isn’t to say Bottoms is bad; far from it. Bottoms is daffy, bizarre and self-aware. Think of it like a stoned, queer Heathers or Mean Girls, or maybe Booksmart’s punch-drunk, slacker cousin. If your preferred form of cinema is one where you can recognize the shape of the plot, but love being stunned and surprised by a filmmaker’s logic, this is your movie.
PJ (Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) are best friends and self-described “ugly, untalented gays” entering their senior year of high school. They each harbor long-simmering crushes on popular girls Brittany (Kaia Gerber) and Isabel (Havana Rose Liu). When PJ and Josie get in trouble for “injuring” star quarterback Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) in an accident at the school fair, the girls claim it was practice for an extracurricular self-defense club. Committing to the lie, PJ and Josie recruit a faculty sponsor (Marshawn Lynch) and a group of female classmates eager to learn how to fight. As the group becomes a community, they’re scrutinized closely by the school’s Jeff-obsessed football team.
While it starts out fairly straightforward, Bottoms quickly throws in unexpected turns that only get weirder as stakes get higher. All the expected beats are there: underdogs, romances, rivalries and your classic high school football game climax. It’s just that all of them are absurdly skewed. In an early classroom scene, there’s a kid in a shark cage—we find out why later.
One of the club members huffs glue with dazed abandon. Another, Hazel (Ruby Cruz), displays a Christian Slater-esque facility with explosives. The final-act football showdown — which plays like Sennott and Seligman asked Lynch to describe an episode of Friday Night Lights and scripted the results — turns borderline homicidal.
Bottoms. // Courtesy Orion Pictures
What makes this ride enjoyable—and not a Not Another Teen Movie schlockfest—is that the cast is 100% committed to the bit. Everything that happens in Bottoms is completely nuts, but everyone is delightfully unbothered. Open hostility and obsessive preening is expected behavior for both the heroes and the villains. Sennott and Edebiri make a great pair of lovable losers who fail their way upward.
Lynch adds another to a string of roles that showcase his shockingly good comedic abilities. Cruz is a particular highlight, bringing impressive depth, charisma and believability to a character that starts out talking about her summer volunteer work and ends the movie by gleefully blowing up a tree.
The point of Bottoms isn’t coherence as much as it is catharsis. It’s a movie designed to make audience members snort soda out of their nose, bark out laughter and drop bags of popcorn in surprise. Whatever you think you’re in for, be ready for something bloodier, messier, weirder and ballsier than you think. You might come out shaking your head, but you’ll probably be laughing, too, and that’s all that matters.
Bottoms. // Courtesy Orion Pictures
