ayo edebiri

After the Hunt (2025)

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Back when I saw Anatomy of a Fall in theaters a couple of years ago, I was struck by the strangeness of the prestige picture having an advertised URL that encouraged audience members to vote on whether the main character was guilty of killing her husband or not. At the time, about two-thirds of viewers believed in her innocence, which has increased slightly to 70% innocent/30% guilty in the two years since release. That film, as well as Tár, was at the forefront of my mind for most of the runtime of After the Hunt, the newest film from director Luca Guadagnino (and a freshman writing effort from Nora Garrett, heretofore a mostly unknown actress). I’m surprised to see that this one has been faring so poorly critically at this juncture (as of this writing, the Google review aggregator is showing a 2.1 rating out of 5 — admittedly only out of 110 reviews. More damningly, both the critical and audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are hovering in the range between 35 and 40%), and I can’t help but think that some large portion of this critical laceration comes from the fact that the modern audience has lost the ability to appreciate ambiguity, let alone accept it or see its value in the context of a piece of art. That, or some are simply too turned off by its approach to its sexpolitik.

After the Hunt is a character study of Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), a professor of ethics and philosophy at Yale, detailing the relationships she has with three primary players in her life. There’s her queer grad student and PhD candidate Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), a young Black woman who nonetheless comes from a wealthy, privileged background; alongside Alma in the department is fellow professor Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), a flirtatious libertine who’s poorly hiding his attraction to Alma; and finally, Alma’s husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a psychiatrist with a tendency toward dramatic flair and culinary spectacle, who is the only one aware that she’s suffering in silence over a painful physical ailment. After a party at the Imhoffs’ one night, Alma watches as Hank and Maggie depart together so that he can walk her home. The following day, she arrives to campus to find Maggie absent and unresponsive. After a quick drink with Hank during which he demonstrates himself to clearly be horny for her, she returns home to find Maggie on her doorstep, where she tells Alma that Hank sexually assaulted her the previous evening. By the next morning, Hank has already set up a lunch with her at a local Indian restaurant where he explains his side to Alma: that he had caught Maggie plagiarizing some of her work a couple of weeks prior and found her doing it again in her PhD dissertation, and that he had wanted to give her the chance to explain herself and offer her the opportunity to come clean before he was forced to rat her out to Alma. In all of this, Frederik tries to support Alma as best as he can, but she keeps him both at arm’s length and uninformed (he learns about the allegations against Hank in the newspaper), possibly because she unconsciously recognizes that he sees all the sides more clearly than she can. 

The performances here are stunning. Edebiri in particular stands out, as the overall complex ambiguity of her performance is an absolute stunner. When Maggie meets Alma to tell her about what happened with Hank the night before, there’s an imprecision to her language that seems to be deliberate, but it’s unclear if the ambiguity is deliberate on the part of Maggie or the screenplay. When Alma asks for concrete details, Maggie talks around the events of the previous night, with vague statements like “He crossed a line” and “When he left, I took a shower,” then lashing out when asked for more details. Is this a natural, understandable reaction to being asked to recount details of a traumatic experience when one is attempting to navigate describing that event without reliving its every moment, or is Maggie trying to compartmentalize a deliberate misrepresentation of the situation for some future leverage without overtly “lying”? Before Hank is fired, there’s a scene in which Maggie and Alma meet each other in the foyer of a rectory/lecture hall, when Alma asks Maggie if she went to a clinic after the incident so that any forensic evidence could be collected, and Maggie tells her that she walked to an off-campus clinic but never made it inside because she felt threatened by some men who were hanging around the place, but that she did see that there was a security camera that would have shown footage of her approaching, and that this, in combination with the fact that she went there immediately after seeing Alma, should be enough to establish a timeline of sorts that would indicate her intention to seek medical services even if she couldn’t go through with it. The statement veers between being completely understandable, as it’s become increasingly popular for men to hang around outside of women’s clinics to harass them, but also seems almost too-practiced, as Maggie “realizes” that she can put together some “evidence.” Edebiri’s ability to straddle this line, to where a reading that she’s a manipulative nepo baby playing on what Hank calls “a shallow cultural moment” is just as valid as a reading that she is telling the whole and complete truth from the beginning. There’s certainly the implication that Maggie was already getting some amount of special treatment before; when she doesn’t come to campus the morning following the Imhoffs’ party, Alma says something offhand about having already given her “too much rope.” 

Garfield is quite good at playing against type here as well, and the extent to which we can believe anything about his version of events is circumspect but also plausible. Even when he’s admitting (or “admitting”) to the singular error (or “singular error”) of going to a student’s home alone in the evening, he never slows down in devouring his lunch, which lends itself to an interpretation that the accusation is trivial. When he loses his job, he goes on a ranting tirade about having had to work three jobs to put himself through school and now that he’s on the precipice of tenure, he may lose everything because of an unverifiable accusation. It’s here that we hit on what is likely the greatest stumbling block about the movie, in that we live in a world in which any text that treats a false accusation of rape is problematic due to the negligible instances of this in reality, in comparison to the ocean of sexual assaults that remain unreported (and, when reported, handled indelicately, incorrectly, and with greater deference to the accused than the accuser). We live in a sexually violent society, and anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that is lying or living in denial, and there’s an argument to be made that predicating a piece of media on something which does not happen, especially when the characters stand to benefit from a false accusation in just the way that detractors of the reality of rape culture often claim they do, is dangerous. I can’t say that this is an unreasonable reason to take a stand against this film, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for taking the same issues with After the Hunt that many took with last year’s Strange Darling, even if the potential to infer misogyny is less textual here. Regardless, we never find out if Hank did it, or if he did how far things went, or if he did just enough to leave himself open to accusation. For my viewing companion, what clinched his guilt was a later scene in which Alma goes to a spare waterfront apartment she keeps as an academic retreat and finds Hank there, hiding out and using a spare key she forgot he had. He makes a move on her, and although it’s clear that a mutual attraction exists, Alma doesn’t give in, and it takes several declarations of “no” and a final violent shove before Hank leaves (exiting the film altogether, in fact). 

For Alma, all of this is colored by her own experience. This is a bit of a spoiler so skip ahead to the next paragraph if you would prefer not to know . . . We learn late in the film that Alma was herself a statutory victim when she was only fifteen years old. Her recollection of the “relationship” is itself warped, as she recalls the youthful crush that she had on a friend of her father’s, one that culminated in an ongoing sexual relationship that she recalls as having been sought and initiated by her, not the older man. She protests to her husband, who rightly points out that she was a child and that it is the responsibility of any adult who finds themselves pursued by a minor to—at a minimum—not acquiesce, that she threw herself at the man until he “relented,” and that she exposed him out of vengeance and spite when he entered a relationship with a woman his own age, and that this scandal led him to commit suicide three years later. She recanted her story publicly, but the guilt of his death is still something that she carries with her, and which over time has metamorphosed into a kind of emotional cancer, no doubt contributing to the perforated ulcers with which she struggles throughout the film. Regardless of whether Maggie is telling the truth or not, Alma’s statement to her that although what Maggie tells herself she’s seeking is restorative justice, what she’s actually attempting is revenge is about Alma, not Maggie; Maggie’s honesty about what happened the night of Alma’s party is immaterial because Alma perceives Maggie as repeating her own mistake, which has itself compounded and been sanitized and mythologized into a Herculan burden for Alma to bear alone to the point where it doesn’t reflect reality. 

Beyond the performances, the camera work and editing here are magnificent. There’s a lot of hand work, as Guadagnino frequently allows the camera to drift from close-ups (most in some kind of profile but frequently with direct-to-camera delivery, which created a kind of intimate space as if we in the audience were in conversation directly with Alma or Maggie) to focusing on the characters’ hands. It’s almost a joke, but it would take an Italian director to not only recognize the intrinsic value of talking with one’s hands but also to invoke the way that the eye tends to naturally drift away from eye contact during difficult conversations. It’s good stuff, and although I can see how it would easily get tiresome for a lot of moviegoers, this is a slow cinema allowance that I’m more than willing to make. The sound design is spectacular, with particular attention to a scene in which Frederik is catty to his wife because of how much he perceives that Maggie is using her, as he is as-yet unaware of the plot-driving accusation. He first interrogates Maggie about her primary PhD interest and, when she becomes defensive, he passive aggressively leaves the room and starts to play loud music from another part of the apartment, with the muffling of the sound provided by the swinging kitchen door intermittently allowing for blasts of electronica to interrupt the proceedings as he wordlessly enters and exits multiple times. It’s another scene that’s multi-layered, as we’re once again led to believe that Hank was telling some part of the truth, as Maggie can’t offer up a single reason why she’s so interested in her particular field of study or even an interesting fact for conversation. Is this because she’s still too traumatized and has come to Alma for comfort and understanding and can’t process Frederik’s question, or is she a mediocre student coasting on privilege and plagiarism? 

There’s extensive discussion of intergenerational practices of ethical philosophy here, and I’m not sure that all of the heady ideas land, but it’s a fascinating conversation that the film has with you. Chloë Sevigny is also present, as Dr. Kim Sayers, Alma’s friend and a practicing psychiatrist. Although Kim vocally objects to a man at Alma’s party saying that if the university decides to hand out only one tenureship between Hank and Alma, it will go to the latter because of “the current moment” regardless of either professor’s individual accolades or achievements, she also agrees with Hank’s sentiments that the current generation of students are too coddled and soft. Elsewhere, that relationship between the two different generations is manifested in Alma’s acceptance of Maggie’s “lesbianism” (Maggie never calls herself that and is in a relationship with a transmasc nonbinary person) but has to be continuously reminded that Maggie’s partner uses they/them pronouns; Alma’s accusation that Maggie’s relationship is more about gaining clout in the current political environment than love clearly hits close to home. This shows that Alma agrees with Hank and Kim to an extent, as when she confronts Maggie late in the film, she criticizes the younger woman for faking her way through academia, crossing a line when she says that Maggie’s phoniness (including her relationship) is what makes it so easy for people to think that women are crying wolf in these situations. It’s a sweeping generalization about an entire generation, but more to the point, it’s once again Alma projecting all of her own trauma onto Maggie, as Alma, at least in the narrative of her life that she tells herself, did in fact “cry wolf,” and it’s those words from the German newspaper article Maggie found in Alma’s home that are the first to be translated for us on screen. 

I’m not surprised that this one is divisive, and I can’t pretend that I’m all-in on this particular narrative device given its real-world ramifications, but this is a marvelous work from a directorial maestro. Challengers left me pretty cold, and I completely missed Queer so I can’t speak to it, but this one has me back on board. I have no doubt that we will soon be inundated with think pieces about how Guadagnino’s usage of Stuhlbarg to deliver a monologue about how what happened to Alma in her youth was not her fault and that she was used by an older man regardless of whether she initiated it or not is a commentary on the changing cultural reception and perception of Call Me By Your Name in the intervening years since the film was released. I’m not particularly looking forward to those days, and the derisive reaction from most of the general public to this one means that we won’t see it become as memetic as Challengers was (not to mention that the subject matter does not lend itself to that here), so this may simply sink without much attention. I think that would be a shame. I’ve already sung Edebiri and Garfield’s praises, but this is a terrific and nuanced performance from Roberts, at turns inhuman and too human, often unsure of herself but with a mask of confidence, projecting confusion when she’s certain of herself. She’s terrific, and so is the film. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Sweet East (2024)

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I’m not really sure how to feel about The Sweet East. There’s a neat little Through the Looking Glass theme that’s threaded throughout that I really enjoy (even when it gets the occasional wire-crossed with Adventures in Wonderland, like most Alice-homaging media does), Talia Ryder gives a magnetic performance amongst a half dozen fully realized supporting roles, and it even manages to get a little surreal on occasion despite being shot with documentary-evoking post-production that effectively contributes to its sense of realism. But I’m not sure if I liked it, or if it was good. This is one that’s best discussed with a plot summary, so if you don’t want to get spoiled, skip ahead to the paragraph that begins “What I straightforwardly love . . .”

Lillian (Ryder) is on a high school field trip to Washington D.C. While out with the group, which includes a guy that she hooked up with and his girlfriend, she is in the bathroom when the very place she is in is attacked by a gun-wielding QAnon lunatic who’s pulling his own Pizzagate. A platinum-haired punk with greatly gauged ears (Earl Cave, bad seed of Nick Cave) pulls her back into the bathroom and, in attempting to get out through the ceiling, discovers that the bathroom’s mirror conceals a secret passage through which they escape through a series of tunnels, avoiding the occasional teddy bear and tricycle. She goes with the punk, named Caleb, and his friends back to their communal crust house, where he eventually shows her his dick under the pretense of showing off his piercings (of which there are too, too many, and some of which seem anatomically impossible). She smokes a bowl with a woman named Annabel who tells her about how she recently left a man because he hit her, then falls asleep. The next morning, she joins a group of a dozen or so of the punks on an expedition to a park in Trenton, where they intend to get into a physical altercation with right-wingers they have been told will be there. The place turns out to be more nature preserve than picnic ground, and the punks run their mouths so much amongst themselves that they pass by the group that they’re looking for without noticing, while Lillian (who stopped to pee) hears them nearby as soon as the punks are out of earshot. 

She wanders into what turns out to be a neo-Nazi cookout, where she immediately attracts the attention of the awkward Lawrence (Simon Rex), who makes his way over to her and introduces himself. Thinking quickly, she gives the name Annabel, and Lawrence, who turns out to be a Poe scholar, just about creams himself; she even takes Annabel’s story about fleeing an abuser, and Lawrence immediately buys her some clothes and food and gives her a place to stay in his family home, which he now occupies alone. Lawrence is a character that puzzles me, because it’s him that I’m least sure what to think of. He displays plenty of overt bigotries above and beyond his closeted Nazism, including wiping a glass of water delivered to him by a Black waitress with a napkin before touching it and using the slurs t****y and f****t conversationally and with his whole chest. He’s handsome because Simon Rex is handsome, and he’s erudite and doesn’t talk down to Lillian/Annabel, but his singular obsession with Poe and what one presumes is at least a decade of no social interaction other than delivering lectures means that he’s a one-track bore on top of being a Nazi piece of shit. Some of this is played for comedy, and some of it lands. When giving her the initial tour, he tells her that she won’t want for reading material as he gestures at shelves full of books like she’s the Belle to his Beast, but when we see any of these shelves up close, they’re full of material of the obsessive war history variety, and she ends up reading a book about the history of trains, if I recall correctly. Later, he shows Lillian the semi-biographical short Edgar Allen Poe from 1909, directed by (yes, that) D.W. Griffiths, and overexplains the way that the film abbreviates and combines various parts of Poe’s life as if this seven-minute short is his Zapruder or Godfather, which is a funny bit. Although Lillian attempts to seduce him are unsuccessful, she does convince him to let her go along with him on a trip to New York, a trip that involves him delivering a duffel bag provided by a skinhead to a rendezvous there. When left alone in their hotel, after convincing Lawrence to move them into a single hotel room so that she could have access to the duffle, finds that it’s filled with cash and absconds. 

Within minutes, Lillian is stopped on the street by two filmmakers, producer Matthew (Jeremy O. Harris) and director Molly (Ayo Edebiri), who immediately enlist her to read for a part in Molly’s film. The two of them talk more at her than to her about what the film is about than what it is, in a hyperactive sugar rush of academia/filmcrit brainworm buzzwords that, unfortunately I understood more of than I would care to admit, which is going to be really embarrassing if there turns out to have been no authorial intent involved. After a brief audition, she meets her onscreen love interest in international heartthrob Ian Reynolds (international heartthrob Jacob Elordi), and the two end up being photographed together by the tabloids. Unfortunately, this ultimately leads to the aforementioned skinhead tracking her down to the shooting location in a rural location, and when Ian’s fooling about with a prop pistol causes a shootout to occur, Lillian is rescued by Mohammad (Rish Shah), a crewmember on the film. He manages to whisk her away to a farmstead across the border in Vermont, where he hides her away in an attic room of a barn and warns her not to let her presence become known, as he has to hide her not just from the neo-Nazis but also his brother Ahmad (Mazin Akar), who is leading some kind of Islamic community, one that includes physical training, assault rifles, and—for all intents and purposes—sweatin’ to the oldies, as Lillian observes from her single window. 

Mohammad continues to keep her locked away by telling her that the killers from what has been dubbed the “Mohawk Valley Massacre” are still loose, but when she manages to get out one day when everyone is away in town, she finds a newspaper indicating that they have been in custody for some time. When the group of men living on the compound return, she manages to convince a charmed Ahmad that she is a local girl who got lost looking for her missing dog, and escapes, only to fall asleep in a snowstorm and be rescued by another long-winded man, this time a priest (Gibby Haynes) who tells her that the police are coming to take her home and then starts to lecture her about the Chapel of the Milk Grotto before she slips back into unconsciousness. She wakes up back home; all of the girls that were in her senior class are pregnant, and people have adjusted to her return, but then her entire family is shocked when the television shows that an apparent terrorist bombing has occurred at the football stadium that was hosting the game they were watching. Who did it isn’t important—the crust conclave, the Trenton neo-Nazis, Ahmad’s group, or even someone completely unrelated—at this point, Lillian has seen a great deal of the east, and the only unifying factor in all of the groups that she has met is that they are all frustrated with the status quo, and ready to do violence. She walks away from the family as they gather to watch in horror, passing in front of a flag with forty-eight stars as we head into the credits. 

What I straightforwardly love about this one is the fairy tale narrative of it. Caleb the white haired punk with the noteworthily droopy ears is our White Rabbit, leading Alice behind the looking glass (even though he is a Wonderland character, you rarely get Alice without him regardless of which work is being adapted); Molly and Matt are the film’s equivalents of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, whose language clearly shares the same words as Lillian/Alice’s but are nonetheless fitted together in ways that she is unable to follow. Some of the other elements are less obvious, as when Lillian is taken for a walk by Mohammad while the others are away and he impresses her by naming every tree that they pass, in an inversion of the scene in Looking Glass in which Alice crosses the “wood where things have no names.” One of the most subtle ones relates to rivers and streams, which in Looking Glass portray the boundaries between the rows of a chessboard in keeping with that book’s motif, and Lillian’s crossing of several rivers and other boundaries on her journey. First, we see the Potomac when she is in DC, and when Lawrence first tells her about his home, he says that it’s “right on the Delaware,” and we see the two of them boating there together. When she’s on location for the shooting of As It Churns, she’s seen sitting on a rocking chair on a dock beside a river, smoking. Later, the crossing of the state border into Vermont is important enough that this film’s segment, as displayed on the interstitial title card, is entitled “First Time in Vermont?” As a Looking Glass Easter Egg hunt, it’s a fair bit of fun. 

Lillian’s actions throughout the film are fun. In each new encounter, she uses something from the previous vignette to her advantage. First, it’s stealing Annabel’s name and backstory when she encounters Lawrence. Later, she cherry-picks an observation from one of Lawrence’s lectures about how Europe perceives America as a young nation that will eventually “evolve” into their “decadent socialism” when it matures, which she turns on the pompous Ian Reynolds when he’s giving the filmmaking group a hard time while out one night. From Molly, she learns that there’s a certain way that she purses her lips when she’s acting that reads as completely genuine, and she uses this exact face on Ahmad in order to come off as naive and dim in order to escape the compound. I’m less enthralled with Lillian as a character. This film has the misfortune of being released after the sustained success of Poor Things, a film with which it shares themes and narrative beats, which is to The Sweet East’s detriment in any comparison. Both feature a naive protagonist who goes on an odyssey of being guided by different people, mostly men, who desire her carnally, and whom she must constantly and continuously evaluate and negotiate with as they attempt to teach her something or institutionalize her into accepting their proffered marriages. 

Talia Ryder is more than up to the challenge, and she’s stunning here, but I don’t love that Lillian is so fond of the r-slur, which is a big hindrance. I don’t expect my protagonists to be perfect, but it sends mixed messages when placed alongside Lawrence’s own bigoted language, which I can only assume is there to remind us that no matter how eloquent he is, he’s an unrepentant racist whom we are supposed to disdain. (In fact, Lillian also uses the f-slur at one point, which I had almost forgotten about.) I’m also not enamored of the “both sidesing” of the various groups we see. The crust punks, who I might remind you we last see setting out to do the good work of bashing in some Nazi skulls, are presented as ineffectual, all while also being mocked for being unable to get organized properly and containing individuals, like Caleb, who are posers with rich parents who are raging to rage, not because they’re at all affected by the machine. Molly and Matt are a parody of what middle Americans think of coastal media elites and pretentious film folk, and we can only assume that Mohammad was planning to keep Lillian captive until she was fully Stockholmed (although there’s sufficient evidence to argue that his brother’s camp is actually a gay boot camp thing). Lawrence is a man whose ideas are objectively evil, but he’s treated with the softest gloves by the narrative, and I don’t like that. It’s possible that there’s something I’m missing here, and I could be completely wrong, but I don’t like this. 

Overall, this one is a mixed bag. There’s a lot that’s great going for it cinematically (director Sean Price Williams was D.P. on my beloved Queen of Earth), and there’s something interesting about the interplay between all of these individuals and communities that Lillian interacts with, but I’m just not sure that it nails down all of its theses as surely as it could and should. Worth seeing, but not internalizing. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Bottoms (2023)

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It’s a disconcertingly popular pastime among Millennial & Gen-X film nerds to ponder “What’s the next Heathers?” every time the discourse turns its evil eye towards the high school comedy genre.  Maybe it’s because we’re old enough to remember a time when Heathers had legitimate pretenders to the throne: that bitchy late-90s malaise that birthed such vicious teen girl high school comedies as Jawbreaker, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and Sugar & Spice.  Maybe it’s because we’re too old to take full delight in those films’ recent, toned-down equivalents in titles like The Edge of Seventeen, Do Revenge, The DUFF, and Spontaneous.  If any films have earned enough cultural capital to compare to Heathers‘s sickly, surrealist take on high school culture in the decades since 1988, only Clueless & Mean Girls could claim to share in its enduring popularity and, although both are very funny in their own way, neither are nearly cruel enough to match the acidity of Daniel Waters’s influential screenplay (or its deliciously evil late-90s echoes).  Whatever the case, it’s not surprising that most professional reviews of Emma Seligman’s high school black comedy Bottoms mention its place in the Heathers lineage, despite there being infinite other heightened high school satires to choose from for easy points of comparison: Better Off Dead, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Clone High, Daria, and the list goes on.  I won’t go as far as to say declaring every successful high school dark comedy “the next Heathers” is a hack move (despite being a certifiable hack who’s guilty of that behavior myself), but I at least want to note that the search for The Next Heathers is becoming a time-honored tradition among an aging generation of media critics.

So, in the interest of mixing things up, I’d like to compare Bottoms to a different heightened high school comedy that I love dearly: Strangers with Candy.  Specific events and characters in Seligman & co-writer Rachel Sennott’s screenplay might have more direct correlations in Heathers (especially in the comedic approach to a potential school bomber), but the tone of the humor is much more closely aligned with the vintage Amy Sedaris sitcom.  The surrealism of Heathers has a dreamlike, soft-focus quality you will not find in Bottoms, which instead repurposes the rotten dirtbag energy of Sedaris’s cult show.  Sennott co-stars with Ayo Edebiri as the film’s Jerri Blank equivalents: two adult actors in hideously slovenly high school drag who relentlessly proposition their classmates for sex while everyone around them obliviously focuses on normal high school media conflicts like homework and the upcoming football game.  In both works, teachers and school staff match the teenage deviants’ dirtbag mentality with equally monstrous comebacks, sidestepping the decorum of professional, adult behavior.  No one acts like a real human being at any time, reflecting the collective, horned-up mania of American high schools’ insular worlds.  The filmmaking is deceptively commercial in both cases (mocking 1970s afterschool specials in Strangers with Candy and mocking 1990s high school boner comedies in Bottoms), delivering pitch-black narcissist line readings with the cheery poptimism of a well-behaved mainstream sitcom.  If you deeply miss the mixture of high-femme costume designs with high-artifice teen cruelty in Heathers, there are plenty of modern movies willing to offer a facsimile.  Meanwhile, if you deeply miss watching Jerri Blank hit on a comically naive Tammi Littlenut (“Pee on me.”) or trade vicious barbs with Principle Onyx Blackman (“You must be about as worn out as a hooker on VJ Day.”), Bottoms is your only viable modern substitute.

The only reason it’s so tempting to compare Bottoms to previously existing works—Strangers with Candy, Heathers, or otherwise—is because Seligman & Sennott’s screenplay is so referentially rooted in teen sex comedy tradition.  Its basic premise, in which two unpopular, unfashionable high school lesbians start an afterschool “defense class” in a misguided attempt to bed cheerleaders, functions as a basic-bullet-points mashup of Fight Club and Revenge of the Nerds.  Sennott & Edebiri are obviously not the typical protagonists of the genre’s losing-your-virginity crisis template, but there have already been plenty other post-Porky’s, post-Superbad correctives to make it clear that high school girls get desperately horny too: The To Do List, Blockers, Booksmart, Never Have I Ever, Plan B, Slut in a Good Way, etc.  None have quite matched the shameless selfishness of Sennott & Edebiri’s manic libidos, though, at least not since Jerri Blank described the way high school football makes her “damp as a cellar down there – all mildewy.”  There are two basic placement tests that will determine your relationship with Bottoms as an audience: whether you find the jokes funny and whether it speaks meaningfully to your personal, pre-loaded high school comedy reference points.  The former can’t be helped, but I would at least like to encourage people to look beyond Heathers to better support the latter.  In general, we could all stand to look past Heathers more often when considering the genre’s darkest subversions; there are plenty other titles to choose from, to the point where the exercise of identifying The Next Heathers is getting a little silly.  Really, what’s most encouraging about Bottoms is how little comparison it supports against Seligman & Sennott’s previous collaboration, Shiva Baby, despite both being queer nightmare comedies starring Sennott.  It’s nice to still feel surprised even while also feeling as if you’ve seen it all before.

-Brandon Ledet