‘The Body’ Season 1 Review: Sin, Sisterhood and a Sermon You Can Dance To

The premise of ‘The Body’ sounds like a dare. Across eight episodes on Netflix, a Catholic high school dance team called The Lions stages a drug fueled initiation ritual that goes horribly wrong, a girl named Grace goes missing, and a wave of hysteria sweeps the town.

Creator Quinn Shephard, who also directed the premiere, built the show around a very personal obsession. “I’ve always been interested in the idea of girlhood as a religious experience,” Shephard told Netflix. That idea runs through the whole season, and it explains why the series treats faith and desire as two versions of the same fever.

My take on this first season is simple. It is a gleefully strange, endlessly watchable show that mostly earns its excess. The tone lurches between camp, teen melodrama and real dread, sometimes inside a single scene, and I found that whiplash exhilarating far more often than exhausting.

The young ensemble is a big reason it works. Kristina Bogic as Anya, Sara Boustany as Elise and Emily Roman as Claire play the material with total conviction, even when the script asks them to swing from a giggle to a scream. They feel like actual teenagers caught between wanting everything and fearing they will be punished for it.

The show also has a flair for atmosphere. The early 2000s details land with affection rather than winking mockery, and a throbbing choral soundtrack gives the school hallways a wonderfully unholy hum. The Catholic guilt is played for satire and for sincerity at the same time, and the queer yearning at its center gives the story a pulse that most teen horror lacks.

Still, I have complaints. Beyond a few standouts, a lot of the supporting characters never grow past their basic job in the plot, and the middle stretch loses momentum as the mystery circles instead of advancing. The finale also reaches for a cliffhanger, as though the show were desperate to promise more seasons when the story already felt close to whole.

Those stumbles keep this from being the sharpest new series of the year, but they never sank my enjoyment. ‘The Body’ is messy, bold and very much its own thing, and I would rather watch a show swing this hard and miss a few times than play it safe. I give it 8 out of 10.

Did ‘The Body’ cast its spell on you too, or did it lose you somewhere between the dance floor and the confession booth, let me know in the comments.