At first glance, Bodies Bodies Bodies, the latest film out of the buzzy hit factory A24, appears to follow the standard conventions of your classic horror film. During a massive hurricane, a once-tight-knit group of hyper-privileged besties and their partners retreat to their friend David’s (Pete Davidson) mansion to weather the storm. There, they play Bodies, Bodies, Bodies (a.k.a. Mafia), and one by one begin to drop like flies—winding up dead on patios, in basketball courts, and at the bottom of staircases. As the bodies pile up and old grievances are unleashed, one question remains until the very end—who’s the killer?

Of course, the answer is not as simple as it initially seems. (For those wary of spoilers, now would be a great time to stop reading.) In a nihilistic twist, final girl Bee (Maria Bakalova) and her girlfriend, Sophie (Amandla Stenberg), discover that there never was a killer: The series of unfortunate events began because David accidentally sliced his own neck while attempting to saber a bottle of Champagne in a stroke of competitive machismo after seeing older, alpha male Greg (Lee Pace) do so earlier that day. In Bodies Bodies Bodies, all the sound and fury, ultimately, was for nothing.

For director Halina Reijn, that’s the point. “The key into this film for me, coming from a radical theater, dark arthouse background, is the fact that there’s no killer,” she says into her computer camera, holding a glass of Champagne. “You know the Three Sisters of Chekhov, where they go, ‘We’re going to Moscow, we’re going to Moscow!’ And they never go, and it ends like, ‘Ah, much ado about nothing.’ That was exactly what I wanted to say with the film.”

An accomplished actor and director in her native Netherlands, Reijn makes her English-language directorial debut with Bodies, Bodies, Bodies. Despite knowing precisely how she wanted the film to end, Reijn still had her doubts about the final twist when the film premiered at South by Southwest in March. “I was literally dying, sick to my stomach like, ‘Is this going to work?,’” she says with an air of relief. “Now that it seems to work, I’m super grateful.”

In earlier drafts of the script written by Cat Person author Kristen Roupenian, there actually was a killer. But Reijn and screenwriter Sarah DeLappe quickly became attracted to the idea that the horrors that befell the group—both interpersonal and fatal—should instead be of their own making. “The core theme of the film is, ‘Is the killer outside of you, or is he inside of you? Are we beasts, or are we civilized?’” Reijn explains.

That the fragility of the male ego was ultimately responsible for inflicting immense amounts of pain and trauma onto a group of young women (and Greg) was fundamental to Reijn’s storytelling. “It’s a metaphor of an old world. It’s a metaphor of a time that, hopefully, we’re still fighting to get that behind us.” With David, she knew that she wanted to explore “white, straight male toxicity and vanity, and the pressure on these old-fashioned men to be strong,” and the ripple effect that can have within a community. “The character that Pete Davidson plays stands for all of those toxic values.”

Davidson was more than game to tap into his darker side to take on the toxically insecure David. “He knew exactly what I was talking about. He literally said he knows guys like that,” Reijn recalls. “He really enjoyed channeling it.” Reijn calls the Saturday Night Live alum a “genius of an improviser” who came up with one of the most instantly quotable lines in the film. “The lines where he goes, like, ‘I look like I fuck, that’s the vibe I want to put out there.’ He just comes up with that.”

Another standout improviser was Rachel Sennott, who plays Alice, Greg’s podcasting girlfriend. Reijn says Sennott gave the film “some golden moments,” including the iconic line “I have body dysmorphia.” “That was something she said to me at dinner, and then I asked her, ‘Can we use that?’ And she was like, ‘Yes, of course,’” Reijn recalls. “She also improvised some beautiful moments, just incredible.” Reijn’s directing style encouraged those spontaneous moments. “I don’t say cut,” she tells me. “I let them go on for a long time. It scared them in the beginning, because they were like, ‘What do you want me to do? The scene is over now.’ I would just not stop. You get these really authentic looks and closeups that you can use.”

Along with letting the camera linger, Reijn applies a theater vet’s collaborative spirit and discipline to her filmmaking. “Sarah DeLappe and me are really fascinated in working with Shakespeare, and Ibsen, and O’Neill, and just trying to steal and be inspired by them,” she says. She credits experimental Dutch theater maker Ivo van Hove as her biggest artistic influence. “I have no film school. I work on intuition,” Reijn says. “But my school was working with him and living in all these plays. I played Hedda Gabler for 10 years.”

If the Hedda Gabler of it all seems like a coincidence after watching the film, it’s not. “I brought a lot of my own personal shit into this film,” Reijn shares. “My friends will know all the private things.” She also brought the work ethic she learned from working in a radical theater ensemble and with Van Hove. “I told them, ‘You prepare like you are going onstage, so I want you to also learn the whole film by heart.’ Ivo van Hove, he expects if he comes into rehearsal, you better stand in your place where he left you the last day, in your costume fully prepared. If you don’t know your lines, he will just not direct.”

Every good play needs a set, and the excess of the mansion served as the perfect stage for the horrors of Bodies to unfold. “I wanted to use it as a theater,” she says. “I said, ‘I want a house that Trump would love,’ a house that is like the broken American Dream, right? It’s too much, it’s too expensive.”

The theatrical approach was crucial in nailing the film’s tricky tone and the chemistry of its ensemble. “My approach with these actors was like, ‘Listen, I know you come from very different corners. Some of you are stand-up comedians, some of you are trained classical theater actors, some of you are famous film actors. But let’s create a theater ensemble where there’s no ego, there’s no vanity,’” Reijn says. “It’s not about your character, it’s basically about the story.”

To achieve this, Reijn had the actors watch Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which she calls “one of the best films and plays, of course, ever made,” to nail “the rawness” that she wanted. Reijn nods along as I namecheck Lena Dunham’s Girls (specifically the “Beach House” episode), Scream, and Clue as other influences on Bodies Bodies Bodies, and adds a few of her own. She rifles through Harmony Korine’s Kids, “all of John Cassavetes work,” and the ’80s cult hit Heathers, which Reijn calls “a great film that succeeds in being fun, and horror, and scary, but also comments on that time, and how young people felt back then.”

She also mentions a film I’ve never heard of: Don’s Plum (2001), starring pussy posse members Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, which she says “nobody has seen in America, I feel, because somehow Leonardo DiCaprio made it disappear.”

“They just basically sit in a cafe at a table and it’s a beautiful film. It’s so raw, it’s so vulnerable, it’s very youth culture,” Reijn says. “That was a huge inspiration, and that also was my pitch to A24, and how I got the job, sort of.”

But ultimately, Bodies Bodies Bodies is a work unto itself, a unique blend of horror and comedy perfectly tuned to the Gen Z ear. “I think that real comedy and fun comes from the absurdity of the fact that we’re all going to die in real life,” Reijn says lightly. “We know that we’re going to die. But yet every day we get up, we pay our bills. People are starving, there’s war, but we are still going through the motions of life. And in the face of death, we still worry about these really banal, small things. I think that is how I see this film too.”

There’s a perfect example of this cognitive dissonance in the movie’s climactic scene, where Bee must choose between going after a gun or a phone potentially filled with Sophie’s salacious texts with Jordan (Myha’la Herrold). She chooses the phone. “What I thought would be so interesting and funny is that there’s a gun, but she’s only interested in the phone,” Reijn says. “So much is going on, and she’s like, ‘Show me your text!’ What? But I thought that was so human.”

So, was Sophie cheating with Jordan the entire time? While the film never explicitly shows us what was in Sophie’s phone, Reijn believes the messiest, most human answer is the correct one. “To me, there was definitely still a sexual affair going on between the two, and Bee’s jealousy is just,” she says. “I don’t want to condemn that either. I mean, we’re all beasts, right?”