Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bottoms’ on Prime Video, a Crazed Teen-Comedy Satire from Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennott

For some, A24‘s Bottoms (now streaming on Prime Video) is a Moment of Significance. And by “some” I’m implying that it should be “all,” considering it’s filmmaker Emma Seligman and collaborator/actor Rachel Sennott’s hotly anticipated follow-up to 2020’s terrifyingly good Shiva Baby. Bottoms isn’t the anxiety-attack comedy of its predecessor; rather, it’s a witheringly funny satire of high school comedies that solidifies Sennott and co-star/longtime friend Ayo Edebiri as a fiery, funny duo. Long story short: more from all of these talented people ASAP, please and thank you.

BOTTOMS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: I think PJ (Sennott) and Josie (Edebiri) are insane. No – actually, the world they live in is insane and they’re just part of it. High school in this movie is a positively wretched exaggeration of our more recognizable reality, where cynicism and cheeriness exist in a marriage of toxic codependency. Football players always wear their pads and uniforms, school authority figures are openly prejudiced and the jock/nerd divide makes the Grand Canyon look like a crack in the driveway. And it’s in this setting that PJ and Josie are gay, and also virgins, which makes this story begin as a tragedy, but don’t worry, it’s one of the funniest tragedies ever, and it builds to something, and that something sure is something else. 

So, the plot: A new school year. HOMECOMING LOOMS. On the horizon. A countdown to doomsday. Like all outcasts, PJ and Josie lust after cheerleaders, specifically and respectively, the aloof, supermodelesque Brittany (Kaia Gerber, daughter of Cindy Crawford) and incredibly popular quarterback-kisser Isabel (Havana Rose Liu). They are SO out of PJ and Josie’s league. I mean, our heroes have messy hair and sloppy clothes and possess enough intelligence to make them stand out among the crowd, and even then, they don’t always seem particularly smart. In order to boost their cred, they lie that they spent the summer in juvie, getting in fights and occasionally killing other inmates. See, like I said, not always particularly smart, but other people believe them, which makes those other people even less particularly smart.

PJ and Josie are the objects of heaps of abuse – bullies regularly scrawl gay slurs on their lockers, and when the angry, greasy principal takes to the intercom to call them to the office, he refers to them as the “ugly, untalented gays.” They decide their best bet for quelling their crushes is to start a girls-only fight club, which they pass off as a “feminist self-defense” club, drafting their history teacher Mr. G (Marshawn Lynch exclamation point!) as their advisor, because he half-asses it through the day and thumbs through divorcee porno mags in the middle of class, and is therefore too disengaged to notice any shenanigans. The club attracts fellow misfits like Hazel (Ruby Cruz) and Annie (Zamani Wilder), but eventually lures in Brittany and Isabel, the latter of whom needs an outlet for her anger since she learned her QB BF Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) is banging Hazel’s mom. Somehow, this plot seat-of-its-pantses its way through montages of girls whaling on each other and acts of juvenile vandalism of varying degrees of destruction, eventually making its way to The Big Game, which ends up being way more violent than ordinary, violent football. CHAOS REIGNS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: We can trace Bottoms’ subversive-teen-movie lineage from Heathers to But I’m a Cheerleader and Mean Girls, although it’s more likely to enjoy the cult status of the former two than the crossover appeal of the latter.

Performance Worth Watching: Our lead duo is the best – THE BEST, I tell you – but we’ll get to that. I’m going to dedicate this space to Lynch, the retired NFL running back who shows enough of a gift for understated comedy that he ends up stealing a few scenes.

Memorable Dialogue: Hazel stupidly thinks the fight club is going to help their stupid school win a stupid football game:

Hazel: I feel like if we keep it up, we could actually take on Huntington, you guys!

PJ: No, if we keep it up, we can put our fingers inside of each other! Grow up!

Sex and Skin: Just off-screen sex, although I’d characterize the part where Brittany straddles PJ and repeatedly pummels her gleefully smiling face as a sex scene.

Our Take: LET IT HERETOFORE BE KNOWN that Bottoms doesn’t make much sense, but the absurdist reality co-scripters Sennott and Seligman concoct doesn’t adhere to logic as we understand it, and I suggest you just roll with it, because it’s more fun that way. The film is a take-no-prisoners satire of teen comedies and neo-feminism that manages to temper its unapologetic misanthropy with a bit of tenderness – but thankfully not too much. Sennott leans heavily into her agent-of-chaos role, and Edebiri is more sympathetic, but still a willing participant in the shit-stirring that’s bad trouble disguised as good trouble. Their performances are consistently charismatic and funny, and fit together like fingers inserted into – into a finely tailored glove, of course. C’mon, get your head out of the gutter! Grow up!

Seligman’s loosey-goosey approach to tone and plotting feels carefully designed to keep us off-kilter and therefore vulnerable to the film’s brand of blindside, kidney-punch comedy. She uses John Waters-esque surreal exaggeration to amplify coming-of-age anxieties about sex and violence; there’s subtextual tension here that PJ and Josie aren’t necessarily hoping to lose their virginity before graduation, but before a disgruntled classmate blows up the entire school. The film cuts up gender roles and social disparities not conscientiously, but like a deranged serial murderer craving a messy kill. It’s rebellious and wild, and is too ambitious in its pursuit of uncomfortable laughs to engage in virtue signaling or self-righteousness. Control is frequently an illusion, but in this reality, it definitely is, and on second thought, it may not exist at all. Which is to say, Bottoms is absolutely, deliciously out of control, and all the better for it.

Our Call: Funniest movie of the year? Might be! STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.