A women’s self-defense club in a heightened toxic heterosexual high school? Welcome to “Bottoms.”
Rachel Sennott (“The Idol,” “Bodies Bodies Bodies”) co-wrote the high school comedy with “Shiva Baby” director Emma Seligman. Sennott plays queer teen PJ opposite “The Bear” breakout Ayo Edebiri, who portrays PJ’s childhood bestie Josie. The duo lust after their respective crushes, Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber), while trying to navigate teendom in the shadow of quarterback Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) and his cronie, teammate Tim (Miles Fowler).
PJ and Josie accidentally found a female fight club, co-run by misfit outcast Hazel (Ruby Cruz), with the hopes to befriend (and hook up) with cheerleaders under the guise of feminism. Marshawn Lynch, Dagmara Dominczyk, and Punkie Johnson also star in the highly anticipated, R-rated summer comedy.
Writer-director Seligman told Entertainment Weekly that she opted not to rewatch “Superbad” or “American Pie” because “I think we didn’t want to be influenced by them, but definitely we felt like queer women hadn’t gotten there due from a teen sex comedy.”
Lead star Sennott added, “We had references in our mind in terms of ‘Scott Pilgrim,’ ‘Jennifer’s Body,’ ‘Jawbreaker,’ all these different movies. But we also wanted to make sure we weren’t [just] doing one and that it was a mashup of genres. It’s a campy high school movie, but it’s also an action movie. I think no one actually thought that we were gonna make it bloody. We had our producers calling them being like, ‘Did you add quotes?’ And they were like, ‘Just for clarity, it’s not actually a fight club…?’ We were like, ‘It’s a fight club!’”
The IndieWire review out of 2023 SXSW praised the film‘s creation of a “weird, parallel world with almost cartoon-like logic, heightened to the point of self-serious parody” in the vein of “Not Another Teen Movie” and “Do Revenge.”
“‘Bottoms’ is an ambitious sophomore feature from a director who is just getting started, one that can craft both a hilariously surreal teen sex comedy and marry it with one hell of an eye for action sequences,” the review reads. “Josie and PJ may be at the bottom of the food chain, but Sennott and Seligman are anything but.”
“Bottoms” premieres August 25 in theaters. Check out the trailer below.
