Jennifer's Body

Though its mildly revisionist, “the-victim-is-now-the-monster” plot would seem to imply an upending of the horror genre, Jennifer’s Body seems more interested in both satirizing the genre’s fascination with the female specimen—whether writhing in pleasure or squirming in pain—and using it to enliven its story of complicated female friendship. Writer Diablo Cody and director Karyn Kusama take their cues from Buffy the Vampire Slayer more than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with demons and dismemberment acting as splattery manifestations of voracious teenage sexuality or the vicissitudes of a certain type of female relationship.

Specifically, it’s that friendship between the popular bombshell and the quiet nobody that began in childhood and continued into high school through a combination of habit, shared history, and the nobody’s stubborn hope that she will fully gain the attention and affection of the bombshell. Here, the nobody is Needy Lesnicky (a splendid Amanda Seyfried), a pretty-average high school student with an adoring drummer boyfriend, Chip (Johnny Simmons). She has been best friends with Jennifer Check (Megan Fox)—a cheerleader with flowing brunette locks and a come-hither look in her eye—since childhood. Needy sees little wrong with Jennifer’s at-once controlling and distant demeanor, so long as they share those stray moments of intimacy that can make even the most one-sided friendships seem worth it. Cody has been accused (sometimes accurately) of caricature in her writing, but it’s mostly kept to a minimum here. She possesses genuine empathy for suburban high school existence and understands the pull of being the “popular kid’s” friend, even as she finds the humor in such a relationship’s toxic undercurrent.

Jennifer takes Needy along to a local dive bar to hear visiting indie rock band Low Shoulder, where she hopes to seduce the fetching lead singer Nikolai Wolf (a nicely sleazy Adam Brody). During the show, a freak fire burns down the bar and kills dozens. Nikolai capitalizes on Jennifer’s confusion and lures her away from Needy and into the band’s van. They proceed to drive her to the woods and sacrifice her to Satan, following a ritual that promises fame and fortune to whomever sacrifices a virgin. Of course, Jennifer is far from inexperienced (“I’m not even a back-door virgin,” she confides in Needy) and the plan backfires. Jennifer is revived without seeming effect, and continues her queen-bee lifestyle at school. But the ritual has inadvertently turned her a succubus who needs to feast on human—specifically teenage male—flesh to survive. When her fellow students begin turning up dead, Needy has to figure out what has happened to Jennifer and what, if anything, she can do to stop her bloody rampage.

Cody’s screenplay smartly has it both ways with Jennifer. She’s the traditional horror-movie victim of violent male assault whose demonic reincarnation allows for gory female revenge. Yet, Jennifer’s murders aren’t really about feminist vengeance. She needs male flesh in order to stay strong and look good. The unspoken joke of Jennifer’s Body is that Jennifer’s flesh-eating killing spree is really just a grisly manifestation of her old, manipulative personality; she’s always used people, especially men, so why not feast on them too? It’s a tart and funny idea, and it battles for thematic prominence amongst a handful of other satiric targets swarming around inside Cody’s somewhat-messy screenplay. Some are quite funny and occasionally daring, as when she casts a jaundiced eye on the high school’s group mourning after the first murder (a bathos-heavy ballad by Low Shoulder becomes the grieving town’s “unofficial anthem”). But if the film’s freewheeling style leads to some tangy and surprising jokes, it also gives Jennifer’s Body an indeterminate tone that leads to strained and uncertain passages. This proves particularly true of the film’s suspense sequences, which are too flip to be frightening yet played a little-too-straight to be funny. Kusama injects much of Jennifer’s Body with a cheeky and energetic style, but her reliance on well-trodden horror movie visuals in these moments only underlines the confusion.

Then there’s the much-discussed Diablo Cody dialogue: a mixture of esoteric pop references and oh-so-geek-chic slang that leaves me in a state of perennial unease. I’m not against it, necessarily, as Cody often pulls out a corker of a one-liner when you least expect it (Needy, after Chip asks the make and model of the van that Low Shoulder put Jennifer into: “I don’t know! An ’89 Rapist?”). Just as often, though, her one-liners feel airless, breaking a scene’s tension or emotion with their clunky over-stylization. For a film that aims for some difficult tonal shifts, the dialogue has the curious effect of making distinctive scenes feel oddly similar, dampening the playfully anarchic spirit that defines the film’s best moments.

Still, we need more voices like Cody and Kusana in mainstream filmmaking: writers and directors whose interest in female—specifically female teen—experience go beyond how she will be wooed by the obligatory boy (though Needy and Chip’s relationship here is notable for its unforced tenderness). Needy and Jennifer’s friendship is prickly and funny in all the right ways, and a moment when stronger, more amorous emotions bubble to the surface feels at once cannily aware of audience expectations (Two girls making out? Hot!) and specifically calibrated to the girls’ complicated relationship. And hey, anybody who can get a genuinely engaging performance out of Megan Fox—and she is pretty gosh-darn amusing here—has to be doing something right.

                                            Matt Connolly