The Body Review: Despite Modest Blessings, Netflixs Catholic Schoolgirl Horror-Drama-Satire Leaves Much to Be Desired

The girls of St. Marks Catholic High School are no saints. They spend their weekends drinking and dancing and hooking up at parties; they spend their schooldays gossiping and lying and keeping secrets. At one point, they invoke Satan as a joke and then seal the pseudo-ritual by dropping molly, unwittingly kicking off a chain reaction of events that will threaten to swallow their town whole.

If only the sins committed by their show were nearly as exciting. While The Body is not without its modest pleasures, they’re spread too thin over eight hours gifted with more ambition than effectiveness. In its uneven mélange of two-dimensional characters and underexplored ideas, the Netflix drama does a finer job of paying tribute to its pop culture forebears than of staking its own claim among them.

To TL;DR the premise, it’s Yellowjackets meets Carrie, at least to start. The tone is mostly straight-faced, neither bone-chillingly spooky nor bitingly funny, though it flirts from time to time with Emerald Fennell-ian excess and Ryan Murphy-esque irreverence, especially in the premiere directed by creator Quinn Shephard (Under the Bridge).

In the fall of 2004 — a setting you could carbon-date even without the caption by the velour tracksuits, Motorola flip phones and Balenciaga handbags, courtesy of costume designer Mirren Gordon-Crozier — the Lions, St. Marks’ all-female dance troupe, is holding tryouts. The team’s situation is dire: They’ve just lost a key member to injury in the weeks before regionals, and even the most promising of the new candidates, Grace (Sofia Wylie), is such a goody-two-shoes that co-captains Elise (Sara Boustany) and Anya (Kristina Bogic) disagree over whether she’ll be able to hang.

But the real trouble begins once a new girl is chosen for induction into the team. After a Halloween hazing ritual goes disastrously awry, the Lions are visited by strange visions and hard-to-explain occurrences that eventually blow up into a community-wide hysteria whose origins might be divine, demonic or just plain psychological.

Regardless of their true provenance, the show’s best weapon is its villain, who quickly makes herself known to us if not yet the characters around her. Lisbeth (Geena Meszaros) is a recent transfer whose painfully awkward affect and plain looks (achieved by bleaching a conventionally good-looking actor’s eyebrows into oblivion) make her an unlikely fit for this Lion’s den. Toss in that she lives in a shabby, Church-funded house with a strict fundamentalist mother, Catherine (Louisa Krause), and you might be tempted to take pity on her, as sweet Anya does when she impulsively invites Lisbeth to a party.

But having thus gotten her foot in the door with the cool girls, this kicked puppy quickly reveals herself to be a snake. Meszaros manages the impressive trick of making Lisbeth seem skin-crawlingly off-putting even when she’s not doing much at all — just chatting with Anya in her cloying singsong of a voice, or fluttering her fingers around a Bible like a child raring to go to town on a toy. Lisbeth is not a subtle or complex character, even if her psychology is broadly comprehensible (hurt people hurt people, and all that). But Meszaros makes Lisbeth’s one-dimensional coldness seem akin to an elemental force.

The other characters are saddled with similar flatness but, unfortunately, not the same compelling anti-charisma. It’s not for lack of effort on the part of the cast. Bogic and Boustany share a beguiling chemistry as thick-as-thieves besties who might be more if they could ever shake off the terror of being queer in a culture that considers it a grotesque perversion. Jackson Kelly gives a touching performance as Lisbeth’s little brother Leo, whose wide-eyed sincerity stands in marked contrast to the flagrant sinning and cruel carelessness that surrounds him. And while Gabby Windey, of The Traitors and The Bachelor fame, is essentially in a glorified cameo as the Lions’ indifferent and ineffectual coach Shauna, her kooky charm is welcome all the same.

It’s the writing that comes up short. Despite its luxurious run time, The Body struggles to flesh out its ensemble beyond their most basic narrative and thematic functions. The result is characters who are legible enough to understand, even for noncommittal second-screeners, but not quite interesting enough to love.

Missed opportunities abound. A storyline that pairs prickly Elise and pure-hearted Leo seems promising in its unpredictability, only for the dynamic to get dropped once it’s served its narrative purpose. Efforts to uncover the truth by Father Franklin (Nnamdi Asomugha) — the school priest, who also happens to be Grace’s uncle — provide dramatic tension but, strangely, precious little insight into how this whole ordeal might change a man of God’s relationship with his own faith.

Likewise, though The Body gestures at some interesting ideas, it lacks the curiosity, the courage or perhaps the capability to follow them into truly daring territory. The show’s aesthetic frequently plays in the blurred line between religious iconography and sexual imagery — as highlighted crassly in the “slutty angel” and “slutty God” Halloween costumes donned by the girls, and more loftily in classical paintings of tastefully nude saints in the throes of (supposedly spiritual) ecstasy. But it stops shy of taking that connection into darker or twistier or more surprising places. It’s content just to point out it exists.

The show suggests halfheartedly that the seeds of our present can be found in this era, in which characters watching TV flip between the sexualized vapidity of The Simple Life and the jingoistic violence of the Iraq War. (Donald Trump even makes a brief appearance, as host of The Apprentice.) But the references are too vague and too far between to amount to much more than a “Hey, remember this?” One gets the sense that the time period was chosen primarily for its trendy nostalgic appeal — which would be fine, except that as with so many of its choices, The Body seems to want it to be deeper than it is.

Which is fitting, in its way: What is religion if not a promise that you can be something more than you are, that something more profound awaits, that everything means something no matter how trivial or random it might seem at first glance? But if it’s transcendence you’re after, you’re probably better off seeking it in the pews. The Body, in its minor blessings and disappointing shortcomings, remains stubbornly of our own mundane world.