When I was a teenager, a movie like Bottoms wouldn’t have existed. I was 12 years old when Superbad (2007) came out, and I remember sneaking in to see it in theatres with one of my best friends. I’ve seen Superbad more times than I can count, and it still feels like one of the genre-defining high school comedies of my generation. But to see a raunchy, R-rated high school comedy centred around two queer girls would have been unthinkable to 12-year-old me. Bottoms follows the aforementioned queer girls as they try to hook up with their popular cheerleader crushes by starting an after-school fight club. Lesbian protagonists aside, the movie feels in many ways like a 2000s-era comedy—right down to the blooper reel in the end credits. I don’t mean that as an insult, though. The movie is as much indebted to 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) as it is to Fight Club (1999), and it’s made for the kind of people who think both are masterpieces in their own ways. In other words, me. I am absolutely the target audience for this movie, so, of course, I loved it. Everything from nods to Fincher and cult classics like But I’m A Cheerleader (1999) to the music, with a soundtrack by Charli XCX, feel purposeful and eclectic. Yet, the movie never feels stale or derivative. That’s largely thanks to writer/director Emma Seligman and a fantastic cast, led by Rachel Sennott (who co-wrote the film with Seligman) and Ayo Edebiri, both of whom are oozing with talent and destined to be absolute stars. High school comedies like this, and comedies more broadly, feel like they’ve become fewer and farther between in the age of big-budget superhero blockbusters. The only recent analog that comes to mind is 2019’s Booksmart, which is a great movie in its own right. But Bottoms is weirder, wilder, and gayer. Its humour is silly and specific, and the movie deftly moves between balls-to-the-wall absurdism and over-the-top violence to more grounded moments of friendship and tender adolescent romance. That it strikes that balance and still manages to be very funny is an impressive feat. The movie is full of jokes that stem not just from the excellent script, but also down to the way actors deliver lines or facial expressions to blink-and-you’ll-miss-it production design details in the background to certain needle drops. At the time of writing, Bottoms has made just under $12 million USD at the box office. That doesn’t sound like much, especially on the heels of Barbie, which has been breaking box office records left and right and has crossed well over the $1 billion mark. But it’s a success story nonetheless. Bottoms debuted on just ten screens, but managed to earn the highest per-theatre average on a ten or more screen opening since Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022). The movie never even got an international release. I feel lucky to have even been able to catch it on the big screen (twice). Verdict In the age of big-budget blockbusters, a relatively small-scale high school sex comedy centred on two “ugly, untalented gays” feels like a breath of fresh air. We need more stories that come from specific voices and unique perspectives, even ones that are silly or violent or over-the-top. I think one of the reasons I loved this movie so much is that it feels like the kind of movie that my friends and I would have made, with the sole goal of trying to make each other laugh. It’s the kind of movie I would have snuck in to see as a kid, had it existed back then—the kind of movie I would watch over and over again. In fact, I probably will.
