In the Flesh: Bottoms

With Shiva Baby, her stunningly confident and masterful debut feature about a young Jewish sex worker and the cloying, interdependent, overwhelming community around her, director Emma Seligman set herself a high bar to jump. Bottoms, a screwball comedy about unlikable lesbian high schoolers PJ (Rachel Sennot) and Josey (Ayo Edebiri) starting a fight club to get pussy, opts instead to sprint in the other direction. It’s a bold move in an era where studio comedies have pretty much gone the way of the dodo, but while it takes a moment for the tone to settle, Bottoms is astonishingly funny and quick on its feet, proof that Seligman’s talent isn’t limited solely to tension and cringe horror-comedy. From Marshawn Lynch as the mercurial history teacher Mr. G, whose repeated matter-of-fact dismissal and re-acceptance of feminism had my entire theater in hysterics, to the genuine white heat between Josey and Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) when they share their first kiss, it’s firing on all cylinders.

Bottoms plays as a sort of spoof of spoofs, a Wet Hot American Summer-esque series of plot beats fired off at machine gun pace, absurd explosions of cruelty and violence taken at face value by nonplussed high school faculty and students. It blows a wet raspberry at the idea of taking itself seriously, dancing lightly from joke to joke but still managing, by virtue of Seligman’s thoughtful camera and the film’s top-notch cast, to conjure up heart whenever it needs to make a moment land. PJ’s fight with Hazel (Ruby Cruz), the climactic kiss between Josey and Isabel; it’s all handled with a level of care you don’t often find in comedies, and it gives the high-flying absurdity a grounded quality, a sense that there are stakes, even if they’re patently ridiculous. It’s no mean feat to sell this kind of tonal mishmash, but here it’s pulled off with aplomb. Cutting from effete crybaby jock slut tyrant Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) jamming out to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart to his car exploding in the driveway feels completely natural, as breezy as the straight-faced absurdity of Anchorman or Hot Rod.

Speaking of Galitzine, his turn as Jeff is one of the best comedic performances in recent memory. The star football player and de facto tyrant of the high school in which Bottoms is set, he has a histrionic streak that sets him apart from so many other interchangeable high school sex comedy antagonists, a genuine vulnerability he employs with craven, abject cunning as both weapon and defense. Galitzine’s face, so quintessentially all-American in its bland handsomeness, twists like demonic rubber as he sobs, blubbers, wails, and sneers, mincing his way through the film in a sort of straight camp persona. It’s really something, and opposite Liu as his straight man he seems almost like a malevolent cartoon character escaped from some hellish television program. With Seligman and Sennot’s sharp, ruthless script and a cast in which even the bit players shine, Bottoms is another notch on Seligman’s bedpost.

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn't exist.