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Jennifer (Megan Fox) has a body that attracts boys, which gets her in trouble — like, wrong-end-of-a-sacrificial-knife trouble. Needy (Amanda Seyfried), Jennifer’s dweeby BFF since the sandbox, both loves and hates Jennifer for what she has and what she can get just because she won the genetic lottery.

Diablo Cody, who wrote the film, and Karyn Kusama, who directed it, have clearly been on both sides: resentful nerds in high school (I’m guessing), jeered at by everyone and their sister in adulthood (Cody suffered an enormous backlash after winning an Oscar for writing Juno, and Kusama’s previous film was the universally insulted Aeon Flux). There is a demon of the supernatural kind in the movie, but it gets a lot of help from the demons already devouring the characters from within — insecurity, self-hatred, the twin horns of sexual desire and the inevitable (from a female perspective) disappointment of its fulfillment. The movie is also, in case I’ve lost any of you, an almost first-rate horror-comedy.

Jennifer is lured into a van by emo band Low Shoulder, whose members have something diabolical in mind for her. Their plan doesn’t quite work out, since Jennifer isn’t quite the virgin she’d led them to believe. So she emerges impervious to harm and with an insatiable hellspawn in her belly, demanding the intestines of clueless boys. Kusama’s direction of the feeding scenes will be a letdown for gorehounds but a relief for the squeamish — editing and shadows are her workarounds. Cody’s dialogue occasionally dabbles in the quirky Codyspeak everyone seems to despise, but nobody sneers at stylized patter when Tarantino does it. Besides, here it suggests a shared in-joke universe between Jennifer and Needy.

The warm Needy is the moral center, and Seyfried carries the movie without strain. Someone once referred to Megan Fox as the Uncanny Valley Girl, and while she’s not ready for Uncle Vanya just yet, her lacquered impersonality and crude coyness work well for Jennifer. Fox will probably never be better cast than as a desire-driven, boy-munching airhead. People are rooting for Fox to fail — and for the movie to fail — the way they might’ve rooted for the homecoming queen or the head cheerleader to fall into indignity. But Fox does what the role requires, and Jennifer’s Body works its body-horror metaphors as only smart women who’ve been there can.

What keeps it from being a great horror film, rather than a very good horror film with surprising shades of sadness, is that past a certain point it literalizes too much. I’m a fan of ambiguous horror, and when we (and neutral, rational parties in the film) see the results of Jennifer’s midnight snacks, the threat is irrefutably supernatural. Needy, who narrates, could’ve been an unreliable narrator (the movie begins with her in a mental institution), spinning us a dark and gory fantasia about what she can’t let herself face. “I don’t tell whoppers and I’m not crazy,” she says at one point, but what if she does and she is?

"Jennifer’s Body" thus stays on the level of a smarter-than-average Saturday-night demon-fest. It’s still better than most of what we horror fans are served, haters be damned.

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originally posted: 09/20/09 16:58:44
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