The teen comedy genre has been around since the 1980s, and Bottoms is here to spice things up. Rachel Sennott and Emma Seligman proved to be an exciting actor-director duo with their first film, Shiva Baby (2020), but the red band trailer for Bottoms sees them up the ante with a surreal, violent approach that’s equal parts Fight Club (1999) and Heathers (1989).
Bottoms follows two high school outcasts (Sennott and Ayo Edebiri) who start a fight club in a desperate bid to get attention and hook up with their cheerleader crushes. Their gambit works, and they become the most popular girls in school, but the fight club quickly spirals out of control and leads to chaos in their small town.
The premise hints at the unhinged tone of the film, but the red band trailer really showcases how much pent-up aggression the two leads, and the outcasts who join their fight club, possess. One of them decides to reverse-stalk their stalker, and another proudly announces that she’s going to kill her stepdad (the former draws supportive cheers, the latter less so). There are also lots of punches being thrown, whether it be during the fight club meets or a climactic showdown with a dim quarterback (Nicholas Galitzine) on the football field.
The absurdist comedy was something Seligman intentionally strived for with Bottoms. She told Alternative Press that Shiva Baby had been grounded in real-life situations, so she wanted to attempt something more extreme for her sophomore film.
“Shiva wasn’t always the most fun to write about because she’s crying in the bathroom at certain points,” the director explained. “With Rachel, she just makes me laugh so hard. Like you said, you would just pitch random ideas, and they weren’t always like the ones that made it in. It was really freeing because it hadn’t really been so grounded in reality.”
Seligman and Sennott got along famously during the making of Shiva Baby, and their like-mindedness led to Sennott being a co-writer on Bottoms. This, in turn, led to the actress feeling more creative freedom on the set than ever before. “Emma inspires me and empowered me in making this movie with her,” she told the outlet. “I do really feel like I could do anything now and I’m not scared to, because we got to make this.”
Edebiri had also worked with Sennott previously, which led to the co-lead character being explicitly written with her in mind. Sennott praised the actress’ “amazing” comedic timing and ability to appear “awkward” at the drop of a dime. Edebiri has charted her own path to stardom since she and Sennott were NYU students, with her most notable success being the Hulu series The Bear. She also voiced a character in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2022).
Bottoms headlined the 2023 SXSW film festival in March, where it received critical praise for its writing, directing, and performances. It currently has a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, and we’re excited to hear what you think once it hits theaters on August 25.