The Body review: Yellowjackets meets The Crucible

Mix the teen-girl ferocity of Yellowjackets with the moral panic of The Crucible, dress it up in a blinged-out Juicy Couture tracksuit, and you'll get The Body.

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The beguiling new series from Netflix and creator Quinn Shephard (Under the Bridge) whisks viewers into the halls of St. Mark's Catholic School in 2004, where the school's all-girl dance team is about to face a reckoning of Biblical proportions.

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What's The Body about?

Nnamdi Asomugha as Father Franklin and Sofia Wylie as Grace in "The Body." Credit: Netflix

In the lead-up to Regionals, the St. Mark's Lions have recruited a new dancer, devout Grace (Sofia Wylie), to fill in for injured performer Maddie (Shirley Chen). But one good audition doesn't mean she automatically makes the team. Grace has to be initiated first. And what better place to do it than at a Halloween party at an abandoned convent known as Devil's House?

There, Lions captain Anya (Kristina Bogic) and her best friend Elise (Sara Boustany) cook up a perverse communion, where they swap the body of Christ (communion wafers) for the body of Satan (ecstasy pills). Then, they playfully beg the Devil himself to take Grace's soul as a sacrifice for a victory at Regionals.

Of course, it's all in good fun. But by the end of the night, Grace has fallen into a coma, and Anya finds herself relying on outsider Lisbeth (Geena Meszaros) to help cover up the team's tracks. Now, the Lions must close ranks to cover up their dark secret.

As strange visions begin to plague the team members, they have to face a disturbing possibility: Did they actually summon Satan?

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The Body spins an irresistible sapphic tale of Satanism and Catholic guilt.

Kristina Bogic as Anya and Sara Boustany as Elise in "The Body." Credit: Netflix

For the most part, The Body keeps the possibility of the Devil's true involvement ambiguous. Anya, who has the most to lose if the truth comes out, is haunted by visions of Grace. But are these apparitions truly Grace speaking from beyond the veil? Or just a manifestation of Anya's guilt? And are her teammates actually seeing Grace too? Or just claiming they've had visions, Crucible-style? (While The Body doesn't invoke Arthur Miller's play by name, Shepard's 2017 feature directorial debut Blame centers on high school rivals reading The Crucible, making The Body feel like a natural extension of her prior work.)

Instead of putting together a full mystery box to provide a definitive answer, The Body prefers to examine the impacts of this stressful situation on the fraught ecosystem that is the Lions dance team. The visions become a kind of social currency. Those who "receive" them feel as if they've been "chosen" by Grace. Those who haven't wonder why Grace hasn't visited them (or fake visions of their own to join the club).

The effect on the viewer is a slippery one, placing us in a constant state of debate. Should we put our faith in Grace and the supernatural? Or should we recognize that Grace is being used as a step on the rung to popularity and assimilation?

Amidst this growing hysteria, a fraught triangle forms between Anya, Elise, and Lisbeth. Anya and Elise's hangouts frequently cross the line between platonic friendship and attraction, but Anya's Catholic guilt prevents her from truly accepting her desires for Elise. Her inability to commit fully to her friend drives a wedge between the two. So when Anya needs help on Halloween, it's not Elise who's there, but Lisbeth.

Coming from an intense religious background — complete with speaking in tongues and snake handling — Lisbeth is on a mission to make new friends and get on the dance team at any cost. If that means sowing further discord between Anya and Elise, so be it.

The Body has high school drama in spades.

The ensemble of "The Body." Credit: Netflix

The tension between the three serves as the delicious dramatic engine that powers The Body. With Blame, Shepard already proved herself adept at dissecting the cruelties teen girls can inflict on one another. She continues that study here, with the help of her three excellent leads. Bogic excels as the increasingly frazzled Anya, melding high school archetypes like "popular princess with a heart of gold" and "mean girl" into a character who feels grounded.

Boustany instantly electrifies the screen as TV's next Cool Girl. Her sardonic affect recalls Sophie Thatcher's memorable performance as Natalie in Yellowjackets in the best possible way.

Meszaros catapults between sympathetic and downright scary. Her Lisbeth is as slippery and unpredictable as the snakes the character once handled. Together, the trio leads a talented ensemble of young performers whose dynamic feels ripped from a high school hallway.

That dynamic elevates The Body, with every Lions practice or locker room debrief bursting with rich interplay between the team. Each insult and loaded glance feels real. And when The Body truly lets its girls loose — be it through underhanded backstabbing or violent rituals — the results are vicious and captivating. Even as The Body spirals towards a series of nebulous, even frustrating loose ends, its core characters keep the ship afloat.

Through it all, The Body walks a mesmerizing tonal tight rope. The series is primarily a psychological thriller, turning high school hallways into claustrophobic nightmares where any slip could be game over for the Lions. The claustrophobia extends to The Body's examination of religion as a controlling force. Anya struggles with internalized homophobia. Lisbeth's mother (Louisa Krause) berates her daughter for straying from God. Thanks to this emphasis on religious guilt, images of Christ on the cross soon begin to feel more like signs of judgmental surveillance than of salvation. Crucifix necklaces feel more like weights on the soul than signs of faith.

The Body balances these headier debates about religion with its dark comedy sensibilities. Look no further than the rude sniping between rival dance groups, each with their own highly suggestive, yet supposedly faith-based dance routine. (The Lions' routine, set to Kylie Minogue's "Confide in Me," breaks up the girls' gyrations with a lift in the shape of a cross.)

The Body's attention to nostalgic, early 2000s details is also one of the show's biggest blessings. AIM chatrooms and killer needle drops abound. Plus, the show's title cards are gloriously bedazzled, Juicy-style.

Between these elements and a throbbing choral soundtrack, there's a transgressive fun to The Body's aesthetic, and to the series as a whole. Atmospheric, unsettling, and amusing in equal parts, The Body is nothing short of a devilishly good time.

The Body is now streaming on Netflix.