Bottoms (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Emma SeligmanRelease Date(s)
2023 (May 27, 2025)Studio(s)
Orion Pictures/Brownstone Productions/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: B-
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: B+
- Extras Grade: B+
Review
However much that some people may complain that Hollywood has “gone woke,” it’s not exactly a trade secret that representation has always been unequal in popular entertainment and it continues to be unequal to this very day. Improved compared to the Golden Age of Hollywood, yes, but that’s a low bar to clear. Worse, for every step forward, there’s usually someone trying to hold things two steps back. That’s especially true of genre filmmaking, where some fans need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Yet while genres like science fiction and superhero movies have made strides toward greater representation, there’s one genre that has largely remained the purview of straight white males: the horny teen sex comedy. While grossout humor in general has offered space to female-centric comedies like Bridesmaids, and serious coming-of-age films have also reached out to diverse audiences, the Porky’s of the world still tend to remain stubbornly stuck in the Eighties.
Enter Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennott. Sennott had starred in Seligman’s 2018 short Shiva Baby, which revolved around a bisexual woman having to deal with her feelings of alienation while attending a shiva with her parents. Seligman expanded it into a feature version two years later, also starring Sennott, and the results were successful enough that they decided to collaborate once again. This time, it would be a queer-themed teen sex comedy that let young women be in control of their own sexuality—Seligman has described it repeatedly as being “in the vein of Wet Hot American Summer but more for a Gen-Z queer audience.” The result was Bottoms, a horny teen sex comedy where PJ (Sennott) and her best friend Josie (Ayo Edebiri) are willing to go to any lengths in the hopes of getting laid, but just like the straight white males in standard teen sex comedies, they only have eyes for the young ladies. As PJ later justifies to herself, “Guys do it all the time, that’s the point of feminism.”
PJ and Josie feel like outsiders at Rockbridge High School, not necessarily because they’re lesbians, but rather because they’re not popular ones—when Principal Meyers (Wayne Péré) calls them into his office, he even announces their status over the intercom: “Could the ugly, untalented gays please report to the principal’s office?” When a rumor spreads that they spent the summer in juvenile detention (they were actually sent to an abstinence boot camp instead), they gain an unearned reputation for toughness. So, they hit on the idea to create a female fight club, ostensibly to teach the other students self-defense, but they’re actually doing it as a way of attracting girls and (hopefully) get some real action. They even rope in their clueless but sympathetic teacher Mr. G (Marshawn Lynch!) to serve as faculty advisor.
Joined by fellow students like Hazel (Ruby Cruz), Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), and Brittany (Kaia Gerber), the club becomes a smash success, even if it doesn’t necessarily achieve PJ and Josie’s original goals. That success quickly draws the ire of the Rockbridge football jocks led by Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) and Tim (Miles Fowler), but unbeknownst to everyone, the school’s longtime rival Huntington High has even more nefarious plans afoot for the upcoming football match between the two teams. Will PJ, Josie, and the rest of their club be able to use their newfound skills to defend the school? Will PJ and Josie ever get some? Film, at 11:00.
The Fight Club connections are quite real in Bottoms, not just because PJ and Josie openly use the term, but also because Hazel ends up taking things to heart and starts engaging in some Project Mayhem shenanigans of her own. Bottoms isn’t as openly cartoonish as Savage Steve Holland teen comedies like Better Off Dead, but it’s not exactly John Hughes, either. The gags get increasingly surrealistic as the film goes along, but the characters all remain grounded throughout—well, the ladies do, anyway (appropriately enough, the male jocks are treated just as broadly as women are in standard teen sex comedies). That’s a testament to Seligman, Sennott, Edebiri, and the rest of the talented cast, since these characters easily could have seemed like walking stereotypes. Instead, they feel like real young people going through very real struggles of their own—all while beating the crap out of each other, of course (and beating up members of the Huntington High football team, too). Representation does matter, and it’s nice to see Seligman’s Gen-Z queer audience getting some of that representation in a genre that’s traditionally had a barrier to entry. That’s not “woke”; it’s an honest acknowledgment of the diverse world in which we live.
Cinematographer Maria Rusche captured Bottoms digitally at 4.5K resolution (in ARRIRAW format) using Arri Alexa Mini LF cameras with anamorphic lenses. Post-production work was completed as a 4K Digital Intermediate, framed at 2.39:1 for its theatrical release. It’s bold, crystal-clear digital cinematography, showing extreme levels of clarity even when downsampled to 1080p. There’s some real depth to the image, with all of the layers resolved from front to back even when Rusche deliberately employed shallow depth of focus. The colors are highly stylized, not necessarily bright or bold, but they’re all carefully balanced with each other (there’s a whole lotta stripes going in in the costuming). That adds to the overall sense of clarity, since the colors end up providing contrast of their own from one edge of the screen to the other. Bottoms is proof positive that you can have striking color design without resorting to oversaturation. Could a 4K version with HDR improve that look? Maybe, but it might also be too tempting to dial the colors up beyond what was originally intended.
Audio is offered in English 5.1 and 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio, with optional English subtitles. The sound mix shows as much layering as the visuals do; it’s not necessarily the most immersive mix in terms of surround usage, but it still offers a three-dimensional soundscape that keeps things grounded even when the action turns more surrealistic. There’s some depth to the bass as well, especially when an explosion or two goes off (thanks, Hazel), but most of the low end is provided from the score by Charli XCX and Leo Birenberg, as well as by the various songs on the soundtrack. Bottoms is still a dialogue-driven film, but the music and effects definitely help support it.
Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray release of Bottoms comes with a reversible insert that features alternate theatrical poster artwork on each side. The following extras are included, all of them in HD:
- Commentary by Rachel Sennott, Ayo Edebiri, Ruby Cruz, Havana Rose Liu, and Kaia Gerber
- Commentary by Emma Seligman
- Deleted Scenes:
- Lobotomy (2:52)
- Extended Bedroom Scene (2:54)
- Tim Confronts PJ and Josie (1:11)
- Tim Discovers Lobotomy (:22)
- Tim Manipulates Hazel (1:32)
- Pineapple Juice Tackle (2:36)
- Outtakes (8:50)
- Ride Along: The Making of Bottoms (28:19)
- Theatrical Trailer (2:18)
There are two separate commentaries, the first featuring Rachel Sennott and the primary cast of Bottoms, while the second is with Emma Seligman working solo. Gillian Wallace Horvat serves as moderator on the cast commentary, and she does a pretty damned good job of it, too. Group commentaries with five or more participants can quickly get chaotic and fail to stay on track, but Horvat came prepared with some insightful questions to keep things focused—and it helps that the cast members all display real respect for each other. They cover a ton of territory, too, from the writing to the filming and their thoughts about the story and characters. (Physical media fans will appreciate that Horvat closes the discussion by asking everyone for their thoughts about the benefits of physical media.) It’s a fun track.
Seligman’s commentary is a bit more scene-specific but no less interesting, with her breaking things down on a more technical level. She talks about the conception of the film and the writing, including how it was revised during the editorial process, and she delves deeply into the costumes, locations, sets, and even the props. (She warns listeners up front that she’s going to spend a lot of time on the props, and she wasn’t kidding, either.) She also covers subjects like the music, the stunt work, the religious perspectives, and even the background extras. Seligman actually apologizes for being all over the place, but however much she may free-associate at times, she’s still more focused than she thinks that she is. It’s another good track.
Ride Along is a genuinely enjoyable making-of produced in-house by Robert Sweeney. It features Seligman, Sennott, Edebiri, Liu, Gerber, Cruz, and Marshawn Lynch, all of whom offer their own unique perspectives on the film. They explain how the story evolved over multiple drafts, with everything originally more over-the-top, but it eventually ended up more grounded without losing all of the absurdity. Sennott and Edebiri were already comfortable working with each other and freely improvised on set, which made it challenging to get through takes (although Seligman says that Lynch was actually one of the best improvisers that she’s ever seen). Everyone was playing variations of stereotypes, but they all brought something to the table to keep their characters unique and/or grounded—in Lynch’s case, he felt that working on the film was a way of making amends for how poorly he handled his own sister coming out when they were in high school. Ride Along may be only a half-hour long, but there’s some real depth here.
The Deleted Scenes demonstrate some of the reshaping that went on during the editorial process, including an entire subplot with PJ and Josie being sent to the boot camp to try to force them to sublimate their sexual urges (it’s called Ladies Overcoming Bad Opportunistic Tendencies Of Mistaken Youth, or LOBOTOMY). There are also some extended sequences that were trimmed down for the final cut—and a few funny lines were lost in the process, but it’s still easy to see how things flow more smoothly in the theatrical cut.
Finally, the Outtakes are an actual collection of outtakes, not an edited down gag reel. They’re not necessarily hilarious, but they do show some of the raw improvisations that went on—and there’s an extended section in the middle that proves Seligman wasn’t kidding about Lynch’s improvisational abilities. While Bottoms was the brainchild of Seligman and Sennott, making the film was unquestionably a collaborative process, and the outtakes are a great example of how that worked in practice.
It’s a really nice slate of extras for a film that wouldn’t have gotten the same kind of love from a major studio. Bottoms still won’t be for everyone, which may be one reason why Kino Lorber elected to release a Blu-ray instead of a UHD—the design of the film could have really popped in 4K, but again, it might have been tempting to make it pop a bit too much. There’s plenty of life left in the Blu-ray format, as Kino’s release proves, and there’s plenty of room for representation, as Bottoms proves. It’s definitely recommended.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).