Film Review - Bottoms
Images courtesy of Warner Bros.
Campy, comical, and twisted, Bottoms is an all-American teenage wet dream dripping in homoerotic high school fantasies. You’ll definitely be talking about this fight club!
Bottoms (2023) is a classic loser-to-popular-girl pipeline story, with some fatal character flaws and lesbianism thrown into the mix. This time the girl isn’t pining after the Jock, she’s pining after the cheerleader!
PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) are “ugly untalented gays” with a plot to (consensually) get their fingers into cheerleaders Isabel and Brittany, but not if the Jocks can help it. With rumours spreading around their school about their summer in ‘juvie’ (juvenile detention), PJ and Josie decide to speak with their fists!
Director Emma Seligman and starring actor Rachel Sennott are becoming a formidable duo in the film world. The pair worked together in the short film Shiva Baby released in 2018 which was then adapted into a feature-length film of the same name released in 2020. Collaborating again in Bottoms, it’s no wonder Seligman has picked Rachel Sennott to play a leading role alongside Ayo Edebiri. The two actors deliver awkward and shy performances, authentic to the two ‘losers’ they play on screen. The intentionally clumsy timing of their line delivery is interjected with punches of satire at just the right moments so that you’re not left cringing for too long before breaking into laughter.
Here Fight Club (1999) meets Mean Girls (2004) with some subtle influences from Heathers (1988). Bottoms breaks feminism and approaches the classic teenage high school drama with raunchy comedy and some mild bloodshed. Seligman also subverts the tropes often found in high school dramas, by fetishising the jock instead of the cheerleader and featuring leads that are proud to be called lesbians, unlike Mean Girls’ Janis Ian.
This film gets weird! The jocks never take off their football jerseys and even wear them to class. The school wrestler champion is locked up in a cage in the classroom. And a football game becomes murderous. I’m glad that my high school wasn’t so bad that we had to create our own fight club!
Although I am still a sucker for the cynical black comedy of Heathers, Bottoms will be added to my rotation of campy high school dramas.
Seligman slayed, and slayed.
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Bottoms is screening in cinemas from Thursday 30th November. For tickets and more info, click here.