‘The Body’ Netflix Review: Teenage Hormones, Religious Hysteria and a Little Help From the Devil

In 2004, Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. The Argentine filmmaker’s second feature followed a group of teenage girls whose confusion over their emerging sexuality became entangled with religious visions and spiritual obsessions. Something remarkably similar happens in The Body, albeit in a rather different setting: a Catholic school where adolescent hormones, religious fervor and sexual confusion become increasingly difficult to tell apart. The show is set in 2004, though its retro atmosphere owes more to the movies of that era than to any particularly accurate reconstruction of the period. Still, the combination of religion and sexuality works just as well. Teenage hormones, after all, tend to operate pretty much the same way everywhere.

I have no idea whether Quinn Shephard has seen Martel’s film or is even familiar with it, but the similarities are striking. The director of the series Under the Bridge and the film Not Okay has a particular knack for portraying groups of teenagers with a degree of authenticity and ambiguity that is well above the norm. Her characters are confused, sometimes cruel, and often capable of making terrible decisions, but they are never defined by a single trait. They are complicated, messy young people (mostly girls), full of desires, fears and, above all, anxieties. And those anxieties often lead them to behave in deeply problematic ways.

In The Body, the central characters are members of The Lions, the dance team at Saint Mark’s Catholic School, along with the people orbiting around them: parents, priests, nuns, boyfriends and friends. At the center of the story are two girls who run the group, the demanding and somewhat self-important Anya (Kristina Bogic) and Elise (Sara Boustany), and two aspiring recruits hoping to make the cut. After auditioning a group of girls that includes the decidedly odd Lisbeth (Geena Meszaros) and the naturally gifted Grace (Sofia Wylie), the friends decide to invite the latter to a party at a supposedly haunted location, where they plan to announce that she has made the team. But Lisbeth finds out about the gathering, leaving Anya with little choice but to invite her along as well.

It’s Halloween, so everyone shows up in costume. Once the party gets going, the girls each take an ecstasy pill and perform a mocking little invocation to the Devil. Grace is initially reluctant to join in, but eventually goes along with it. The night gets increasingly out of hand. Lisbeth eventually arrives, and while she’s talking to Anya, they come across Grace passed out in the park. Panicked, they decide to take her to the hospital, only to realize along the way that she isn’t breathing. They change course, and Lisbeth manages to sneak her into Grace’s house, which happens to be empty for the weekend. She leaves Grace apparently dead in her bed, as though the girl had never left home.

The next day, the police show up and it turns out Grace is still alive, but in a coma. Panic begins to spread throughout the school. What exactly happened to her? Was it the drug she took? Some underlying medical condition? Or could the invocation to the Devil have had something to do with it? Shephard never introduces any actual supernatural elements. Instead, she gradually shows how the girls begin convincing themselves that the Devil might indeed be responsible, some out of self-interest, others by simply following the crowd, and several because their own anxieties make the idea increasingly appealing. Lisbeth, meanwhile, encourages this religious interpretation of events both to deflect suspicion from herself and to secure a place on the dance team.

But sexuality is the real underlying subject of The Body. Anya has a boyfriend, yet she can’t help looking at her friend Elise with barely concealed desire. Elise, who is openly lesbian, is growing increasingly frustrated with her friend’s mixed signals. Meanwhile, Leo (Jackson Kelly), Lisbeth’s brother, is in love with Grace and completely bewildered by his own sexual feelings, particularly because he is deeply religious. Their mother is a devout believer who seems to be teetering on the edge of madness, and Leo has little room to acknowledge or accept the desires stirring inside him. As the girls, boys, priests and nuns move through this increasingly tangled web, desire, sex and religion begin to look like different expressions of the very same thing.

Shephard has a keen eye for adolescent behavior and does an excellent job of capturing the kind of collective hysteria that gradually takes hold in the aftermath of Grace’s alleged accident. The result is a curious blend of early-2000s teen drama and horror movie, somewhere in the vicinity of Jennifer’s Body, with a little Mean Girls thrown into the mix. There are the era’s radio hits, the mischievous and occasionally downright perverse behavior of the young characters, and all the familiar social maneuvering of high school life. What sets the series apart, though, is the central role religion plays as an outlet for the tensions, impulses and desires its characters struggle to contain.

Eight episodes feel like more than this particular story needs, but The Body has plenty going for it and seems well positioned to continue. Its appeal has relatively little to do with the mystery surrounding what actually happened to Grace, and much more with the world and the characters Shephard builds around that central incident. Anya is a particularly subtle creation: she can be cruel and calculating, but it’s also obvious that she’s overwhelmed from every direction. The same goes for Elise, whose impulsive behavior is often driven by desires she doesn’t quite know how to handle. Lisbeth might initially seem like a more straightforward character, with her transparent manipulations and schemes, but a glimpse of her mother (and father) makes it clear that she’s grown up in a family where dysfunction is practically the norm.

With these characters, Quinn Shephard delivers a promising first season. The ending makes it fairly clear that the story will continue, or at least that this is what its creators have in mind. The series is also helped considerably by an unusually stylized visual approach for a television production, drawing on horror masters ranging from Brian De Palma to Dario Argento while bringing a distinctly contemporary perspective to the desires and conflicts of its young protagonists. The Body may initially sound like a variation on several familiar teen-series formulas, but it doesn’t take long to recognize that there’s a distinctive authorial voice steering the whole thing. Perhaps it’s the Devil himself…