The teen comedy is weird, horny, and dark

Ayo Edebiri as Josie and Rachel Sennott as PJ in Bottoms.

Patti Perret/Orion Releasing LLC

For some time now, there’s been fervid debate around the coital experiences of fictional characters in Hollywood. “Make movies horny again!” cry some, observing an overall decline in sexual chemistry at the movies and on TV. “Sex should only exist on screen if it makes narrative sense!” others bemoan on the rare occasion sex/nudity do appear.

Circumstantial evidence – in this case, random people’s social media bios – suggests a strong generational divide on the subject. The “gimme more” crowd seem to be millennials and older, raised on an MTV-erotic thriller-high school sex comedy diet of the ’80s and ’90s. Those being the most prudish about it tend to be Gen Zers, whose understandings of sex are likely warped by such catastrophic cultural events like the #MeToo movement and the pandemic.

Enter Bottoms, a smart and extremely weird high school sex comedy that manages to be one of the horniest movies in recent memory while also bluntly remarking upon feminist theory – bell hooks gets a namecheck – through a specifically queer lens. Perhaps not so coincidentally, it was created by two women who live just on the bubble of the Gen Z-younger millennial cutoff, director Emma Seligman and her co-writer Rachel Sennott. (The pair previously collaborated on the great and stressful dramedy Shiva Baby.)

Like many fictional teens who have preceded them, best friends PJ (Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) are on a mission to finally get laid before heading to college. The problem is, they’re the “ugly, untalented gays” of Rockbridge Falls High. (To be clear, their unpopularity has nothing to do with their sexual…