This article contains spoilers for Bottoms, so read at your own risk!
If you cross Superbad with Fight Club, you’ll get Emma Seligman’s most recent film, Bottoms. It’s a fun, satirical comedy starring Ayo Edebiri (from Hulu and FX’s The Bear) and Rachel Sennott (from the movie Shiva Baby), who are best friends in real life, which you can see in their on-screen chemistry. This is also not their first project together, and the way they feed off of each other’s energy is so interesting that I honestly couldn’t see anyone else in these roles.
The movie starts with high school best friends PJ and Josie planning to finally get with the popular girls they have crushes on, Brittany and Isabel, respectively. Another girl at school — Hazel — accidentally spreads a rumor that PJ and Josie went to juvie, and the two run with the lie and use their newfound street cred to start a fight club in the gym led by their naive history teacher. Instead, it turns into a place for all the girls in school to practice self-defense, much to the dismay of the school’s football team, who hates that they’re no longer in the spotlight.
After being stalked by one of the football players, PJ and Josie’s lie gets exposed to the whole school and the rest of the fight club. The group disbands, and PJ & Josie have a fight, and we see a typical, cliche, angsty, early 2000s montage with Avril Lavigne playing in the back to set the tone. They only start hanging out again after Josie finds out their rival school has plans to ruin the upcoming football game, and they get the fight club back together.
The film doesn’t take itself too seriously and you can tell. The whole thing was silly (in a good way) and you could tell everyone was on set just having fun. I love the ambiguous setting (it reads as a mix of late 90s and early 2000s, with a dash of 80s, although it most likely is the 2000s.), and I loved how each character’s aesthetic and personality was so clear and distinguishable in their costuming. I love how it also took elements from other teen movies like Mean Girls and Heathers.
I really wish that this movie wasn’t a limited release; it barely hit international theatres and was only at select ones in the US for a short period before eventually being pushed to digital. It deserved to be seen by a wide range of audiences, especially for its LGBTQ+ representation — and with the main love interests both being people of color, at that. Josie is Black and Isabel is Asian; in media, usually, both love interests will be white, or only one will be a POC, so to see some branching out was nice. I definitely feel like the film could have been way more successful with proper promotion and a real release instead of a limited one.
I saw this movie in the theater with my best friend and we were laughing from beginning to end, and so was everyone else in the audience. We had so much fun saying “That’s literally you” or “That’s so me” to things that characters did and said if we felt like they were relatable. Bottoms was some of the most fun I’ve had in the theater this year so far since seeing Barbie.
I highly recommend watching this movie, especially if you need a laugh. It was colorful, fun, and an all-around great time. I can’t wait to see what Rachel and Ayo do next, and I also can’t wait to give this movie another watch.