Three young women, Holly (Helen Rogers), Cali (Alexandra Turshen) and Mel (Lauren Molina) are spending Christmas together at Mel’s parents place. The night before Christmas they decide, rather than having a quiet night in, they will make their own party and visit Cali’s abandoned relative’s mansion. After raiding the liquor cabinet and getting a little rowdy they run into someone they didn’t expect and manage to injure them severely. Things get complicated form here on and the girls must decide whether to own up to their crimes or keep trying to dig their way out of the hole they have made for themselves. “What would you do if you suddenly had a body on your hands?” is the central question in Body, a great little thriller from Dan Berk and Robert Olsen.
Berk and Olsen keep things simple ,the small cast and straightforward story allow the filmmakers to spend their time exploring how different personality types deal with the morally grey areas of life. The directors have described the three leads as symbolizing the id, the ego and the super-ego. Holly is the empathetic representation of the super-ego, Cali is the brazen, self-interested id and Mel tries to mediate between the two as the ego. The three women debating how to deal with the situation could easily represent the mental process we all go through when faced with life’s tough choices.
Matt Mitchell's efficient cinematography, creates a world that looks comfortable, yet cold, and Luke Allen’s score is subtle but effective. The few flaws in the movie can be found in the script. The dialogue is mostly superficial, rarely offering any more information than what the characters are thinking at any one time. The set up is also fairly generic. Apart from the fact that Holly has a tendency to invite her boyfriend to girl’s only nights, Mel is sometimes irresponsible with her younger brother and Cali can’t spell we know very little about who these people are before the incident. At one point a new character is also introduced and abruptly leaves for seemly no purpose apart from presenting the group with a new obstacle to overcome. These are tiny issues in a film that keeps its scale small and more often than not delivers what it promises.
