Bottoms — Review Thread

Did... we see the same ending?

This year has seen the release of a handful of comedies that looked like they had some potential but which I went into with some suspicion. Bottoms was an exception to this in that it got a whole lot of strong early buzz and had a juicy sounding concept and I was generally pretty excited for it, and that excitement may have worked against it because I found the final results kind of disappointing. The film, from Shiva Baby director Emma Seligman, looks at a pair of unpopular lesbian high school students who are desperate to find girlfriends to the point where they hatch a scheme to create a school women’s fight club of sorts that they think a pair of cheerleaders will join, allowing the two to endear themselves to these (hopefully heteroflexible) girls. That is kind of a dumb plan but the film knows this, the girls behind this whole plot are depicted as being immature and not overly bright. In many ways this is a movie that’s less interested in being a comment on actual social mores than it is in playing with and subverting certain tropes within the “teen movie” genre and it handles some of these better than others. The central characters in the film as played by Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri are quite well done and the film’s basic joke is to do a role reversal in which these lesbian teens are shown to be about as horny and craven and rife with (in their case internalized) misogyny as the teen boys who usually feature in sex comedies. All of that is interesting but I found the movie to be a lot more clumsy when it tries to satirize other aspects of high school. The whole movie exists in this wildly heightened reality in which football players wear full uniform and padding while in school, school staff is wildly incompetent and inappropriate at all times, and school rivalries regularly result in lethal violence. Little of this was particularly funny to me, it was mostly just alienating and distracting. Beyond that a lot about the movie just kind of feels sloppy, with certain elements being brought up late in the film without having been properly established earlier and certain side characters pretty clearly having had their arcs cut down. In general this feels like a bit of a step down from Shiva Baby, which felt a lot more assured and disciplined, though Bottoms certainly has a lot of redeeming elements that almost power it through its flaws.