Bottoms
2023 · Emma Seligman
The director in the conversation
Shiva Baby (the anxiety-comedy every film student cites) and Bottoms made her and Rachel Sennott the center of the "queer chaotic comedy renaissance" conversation.
For a rowdy night with friends when you want to laugh hard at something with real bite — raunchy, absurd, and zero percent well-behaved.
What it's about
PJ and Josie, two unpopular lesbian best friends, start a high-school self-defense club — pitched to the administration as female empowerment, conceived entirely as a scheme to hook up with cheerleaders. Then the club takes on a bruising life of its own, and the most popular girls in school start beating each other bloody in the name of sisterhood.
The experience
Fast, loud, and gleefully unhinged — a joke-a-minute comedy that keeps escalating past where you think it will stop, with fight scenes that actually connect. You'll laugh out loud and occasionally gasp.
Performances
Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri, both hitting their stride as generational comic talents, have chemistry sharp enough to carry every scene — and former NFL star Marshawn Lynch is an inspired deadpan surprise as their teacher-sponsor.
The craft
Emma Seligman and Sennott's script grants queer girls the horniness, selfishness, and slapstick violence straight teen comedies always took for granted, and the heightened, anything-goes tone is controlled with sneaky rigor. The fight choreography lands with genuine impact — the blood is part of the joke.
Why it matters
An instant standard-bearer for the queer teen sex comedy, arriving at the exact moment its two leads became stars, and proof the raunch tradition could be remade rather than just referenced.
Reception & legacy: how Bottoms was received, argued over, and remembered →
Two unpopular lesbian best friends start a high-school fight club — sold to the administration as female self-defense, conceived entirely as a scheme to get close to cheerleaders. Emma Seligman's follow-up to her miniaturist debut Shiva Baby swings to the opposite pole: a broad, blood-spattered, gleefully heightened teen sex comedy, co-written with star Rachel Sennott and pairing her with Ayo Edebiri at the exact moment both became generational comic presences. The lineage runs through Heathers, But I'm a Cheerleader, and the raunch canon that never had room for girls like these; Seligman's insight is to grant queer protagonists the horniness, selfishness, and slapstick violence straight teen comedies always took for granted. The craft is sneakily rigorous — the fight choreography lands with real impact, former NFL running back Marshawn Lynch gives a deadpan-teacher performance for the ages, and Charli XCX co-wrote the synth-heavy score with Leo Birenberg. The whole film operates in a stylized parallel America where football players wear their uniforms to class, a world built with the confident illogic of a cheerleader-movie fever dream.
Lines of influence
- Fight Club (1999) — Bottoms transposes its central engine — a secret, rules-bound underground fighting club that functions as members' identity-forging ritual and myth, sold through the same clandestine-recruitment structure.
- Heathers (1988) — Establishes the deadpan-lethal high-school satire mode — a heightened parallel-reality campus where teen social cruelty escalates casually into literal bodily violence; a cited influence.
- But I'm a Cheerleader (1999) — Model for the artificial, candy-colored production design and camp theatrical staging used to satirize teen sexuality and queerness rather than naturalistically depict it; a cited influence.
- Superbad (2007) — Supplies the horny-teen-quest structure and the rapid, profane, overlapping best-friend banter that Bottoms gender-flips and queers.
- Jennifer's Body (2009) — Blueprint for fusing queer female teen desire with bloody genre violence and arch, hyper-written dialogue that treats gore as comic punctuation.
- Shiva Baby (2020) — Seligman's own debut establishes the author-star method with Rachel Sennott and the anxiety-comedy grammar scored by propulsive, unsettling synths that Bottoms scales up.
- Wet Hot American Summer (2001) — Precedent for absurdist ensemble comedy where non sequitur, tonal whiplash, and straight-faced escalation of the impossible are the primary comic engine.
- Election (1999) — Treats the high-school microcosm — student politics, hierarchy, and popularity — as heightened total warfare, the satirical framing Bottoms weaponizes.
- The To Do List (2013) — Rare female-authored raunch sex comedy that centers a girl's frank, checklist-driven horniness, directly precedes Bottoms' unapologetic teen-girl lust.
- Revenge of the Nerds (1984) — Source of the underdog-outsiders-form-a-club-against-the-jocks structure, complete with training toward a climactic confrontation with the athletic in-group.
- Booksmart (2019) — Female best-friend two-hander that treats an out queer lead matter-of-factly and drives on kinetic music-cued momentum, sharing Bottoms' contemporary register.
- Do Revenge (2022) — Contemporary hyper-stylized, candy-hued queer teen revenge satire set in a deliberately unreal suburban America — the same maximalist production-design satire.
- Assassination Nation (2018) — Stylized ultraviolent satire of a heightened parallel small-town America that erupts into girl-gang combat, sharing the 'stylized parallel America' staging and choreographed violence.
- Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) — Showcases Rachel Sennott's same heightened Gen-Z deadpan performance register within a comic-horror ensemble, the direct performance sibling to her Bottoms work.
- Theater Camp (2023) — Contemporaneous heightened ensemble comedy built on deadpan mockumentary-adjacent absurdism and queer-inflected youth performance, a tonal peer in 2020s comedy.