Review: Finally! Something for Ugly, Untalented Gays

Emma Seligman’s ‘Bottoms’ begs you to consider the horny sapphic

Aug 24, 2023

The Yearning Rating: ✰✰✰✰✰

Romance: ✰✰✰✰
Sex: ✰✰✰✰
Storytelling: ✰✰✰✰✰
Performance: ✰✰✰✰✰
Yearning: ✰✰✰✰✰1

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Light spoilers ahead.

Written by Ali Romig

How long has it been since you saw a truly freaky-deaky high school comedy? I’m not talking about Do Revenge or Booksmart, here. I’m talking your Hairsprays (the original, John Waters version), your Jawbreakers, your Heathers! Teen satires so macabre, they're surreal. So highly hormonal, their angst is practically mouth-breathing against your neck. So perfectly astute and quick-witted, they make you wish you’d thought of them yourself. If you answered “too long,” then you’re in luck. Not since Heather Chandler instructed Veronica to “fuck me gently with a chainsaw” has a high school comedy delighted and disturbed me as much as the new film Bottoms.

Bottoms is director Emma Seligman’s sophomore feature, co-written with star Rachel Sennott. If you’re familiar with this pair from Segliman’s claustrophobic, highly-stressful, and brilliant debut Shiva Baby, well then…forget everything you know. Nothing can possibly prepare you for the wet and wild ride that is Bottoms. In the simplest, most reductive terms the movie starts out as a classic high-school sex comedy, told through a queer lens. Best friends PJ (Sennott) and Josie (The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri) have one goal for the new school year: to get laid. The problem? They’re losers. They’re also both lesbians, but that’s not why they’re losers. They’re losers because they are “ugly and uninteresting”. A fact that is only made worse after an accident involving Josie, her car, and the world’s softest love tap against the knee of star football player, Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine…yes, that Nicholas Galitzine). After a hyperbolic reaction from Jeff, the incident turns them into outright pariahs at school, including with their principal. He threatens to expel them for interfering with “the big game” against their rivals, Huntington. In a last ditch effort to save themselves, the girls make up a self-defense club, aka “a fight club,” under the guise that they’re teaching female classmates how to defend themselves against Huntington’s infamously bloodthirsty football team.

If your reaction to this turn of events is, “huh?” then don’t feel bad. It’s at this point that Bottoms takes a sharp turn into absurdity and cements itself as an iconic addition to the canon—the queer, even more bizarrely outrageous love child of Heathers and Mean Girls…with a little bit of Jennifer’s Body thrown in. There are horned up wrestling matches, homemade bombs, school fundraisers in which the girls sell their dirty underpants to old men, and Marshawn Lynch2 teaching Feminism 101 (“Who invented feminism? Gloria Steinem; a man; another woman?”). Not to mention an absolutely perfect needle-drop featuring Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated.” Bottoms is nothing less than a perfect display of expert storytelling: the film manages to stay both focused and narratively coherent while also unabashedly—and gaily—basking in its own ridiculousness.

Bottoms is able to take things as far as it does because it trusts its audience. It’s a film that knows exactly who it's talking to. Instead of trying to contort itself into something that’s palatable for everyone, it risks specificity—and excels for it. So many comedies today—especially those set in high school—feel like they’re simply guessing at what viewers might want to hear. They offer hollow-feeling messages of solidarity and progress, so moderate that in the end they’re practically sterile. But Bottoms pulses with a refreshingly rare and well-earned confidence. It doesn’t have to work to prove its point-of-view, it assumes you get it. And if you don’t, it doesn’t really care. Seligman’s precise observations are perfectly channeled by Sennott’s spirited, almost-haughty humor and Edebiri’s bewitching performance. Together they bring the story to gleeful, giddy life. I want to live inside this movie.

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The queer—specifically sapphic—perspective of Bottoms is so baked into its DNA that it feels silly to even try and spell it out. At one point, a member of the girls’ fight club literally brandishes a sword. Charli XCX—who acted as co-composer—received a round of uproarious applause in the theater where I saw the film when her name appeared on screen. This movie is the physical manifestation of the sapphic call to “hit me, choke me, spit on my face, etc.” The true feat is that these details are seamless and never come across as too on-the-nose, or like they were written by someone whose entire personality is being “chronically online.” If you don’t pick up on these winks, it doesn’t detract from anything. But their inclusion does let viewers like me (youknowwaddamean) understand that this film is for us.

I’m reluctant to look too deeply at a movie that is almost daring you not to take it seriously, but there is something special about shamelessly highlighting unhinged sapphic horniness! When have we ever seen our desire represented with such gusto? It’s raw and dominant and downright feral. I left the theater feeling affirmed, and even though the film isn’t necessarily going for “affirming”—in Bottoms, feigning female solidarity is ultimately a ruse to “get coochy”—it gets there by way of impenitence. I just know that if I’d seen this movie at seventeen, it would’ve become my whole world, taking over my life with the same kind of single-minded intensity that once led me to create a collage of Katniss Everdeen on my bedroom wall.

If I haven’t made it perfectly clear yet, Bottoms is wildly, violently funny. It’s the kind of movie I know I’ll be seeing multiple times, if only to catch all the jokes I might’ve missed the first time around. The near-perfect script is elevated in the self-assured hands of a stellar ensemble cast, who all orbit with smooth precision around stars Edebiri and Sennott. You may be familiar with these two as a duo from their Comedy Central web series, Ayo and Rachel Are Single. A pre-show consisting of old episodes reminded me of their natural chemistry, and led someone in the theater to call out, almost dejectedly, “they could’ve been the next Broad City!” Alas, instead of languishing on Comedy Central, the pair took their talents elsewhere—but we can thank whatever higher power might exist that they’ve continued working together.

The two play off of each other with incredible ease. Sennott’s PJ is the louder, brasher one of the two. Her ability to deliver such shocking lines as, “Who here has been r*ped? Grey-area stuff counts,” with practiced coolness is both skillful and disarming. She milks every second she’s on screen for all it’s worth. But it’s Edebiri’s performance as the shyer, mumbling Josie that takes the cake (and the cooch!). Edebiri disappears into her role, reciting fabricated stories about shiv-ing a girl to near-death in juvie with hilarious, unnerving restraint. She flawlessly moves between tomfoolery and earnestness in a way that shouldn’t work, but does. Both performers have the ability to make you care about their wackadoo characters, despite the fact that neither PJ nor Josie do anything to garner such goodwill.

Joining Sennott and Edebiri is an entire cast of actors who are game to play. As conceited footballer Jeff, Nicholas Galitzine is so unrecognizable as the solemn Prince Henry from RW&RB that I actually did a double-take. His performance is over-the-top and committed. Kaia Gerber (the spitting-image of mom Cindy Crawford) plays Brittany, the object of PJ’s affection. She is able to match Sennott with her own brand of detached, understated humor, but lets loose with an unexpected vigor when it comes time for the fight scenes. Ruby Cruz is quietly fascinating as Hazel, PJ and Josie’s oft-neglected friend. Cruz has the tough job of being the most consistently vulnerable among the increasingly ridiculous circumstances, and pulls it off with self-deprecating charm. Then there’s Havana Rose Liu as Isabelle—Jeff’s girlfriend and Josie’s long-time crush. Liu might be the biggest and most satisfying surprise of the film. She won me over so completely by the end, and now I am unfortunately obsessed. Award for best line reading goes to Liu for her delivery of “shiny, shiny, shiny” (you have to see it for yourself).

By the film’s climactic ending, its proven itself fearless and so, fittingly, goes out with a literal bang. Bottoms closes with our girls covered in blood splatter (other people’s), and yet still manages to deliver a football field makeout session that could easily rival the likes of Never Been Kissed or The Cinderella Story, giving queer girls everywhere the kind of sloppy, perfect finale we’ve always deserved. Not since But I’m a Cheerleader has a final frame made my heart flutter so! I’m going on the record now: we have a new queer classic for the vault.

Bottoms opens in select theaters tomorrow, August 25th. You can find tickets here.

Next week on The Yearning, Meg can’t help but wonder about Season 2 of And Just Like That.

Reader, behold! The Yearning’s first-ever 5-star review.

A former NFL running back for those gays who don’t do Sports.