“Jennifer’s Body,” a bloody high school demonic-possession serial-killer comedy written by Diablo Cody, directed by Karyn Kusama and starring Megan Fox in the title role, is an unholy mess. I mean that as a compliment. Yes, the movie’s gory set pieces are executed with more carnivorous glee than formal discipline, and its story is as full of holes as some of its disemboweled victims. But coherence has never been a significant criterion for horror movies. If it were, we could forget about Dario Argento and Brian De Palma, half of Hitchcock and most of the entries in the “Friday the 13th” series. And though it is too soon to install “Jennifer’s Body” in that blood-soaked pantheon, the movie deserves — and is likely to win — a devoted cult following, despite its flaws.
These are mitigated by a sensibility that mixes playful pop-culture ingenuity with a healthy shot of feminist anger. Ms. Cody and Ms. Kusama take up a theme shared by slasher films and teenage comedies — that queasy, panicky fascination with female sexuality that we all know and sublimate — and turn it inside out. This is not a simple reversal of perspective; the girl’s point of view has frequently been explored in both maniac-on-the-loose thrillers and homeroom-to-prom-night romantic comedies. “Jennifer’s Body” goes further, taking the complication and confusion of being a young woman as its central problem and operating principle, the soil from which it harvests a tangle of unruly metaphors, mixed emotions, crazy jokes and ambivalent insights.
Jennifer, chilly, dark-haired and beautiful, is both the victim of male violence and a monster of indiscriminate vengeance, a ravening demon and an object of lust and longing. But always an object. The title of the movie is not “Jennifer’s Soul,” and from every angle she is a fantasy, a cipher, a figure in someone else’s fevered imagination. The inevitable critical sneering at Ms. Fox’s acting abilities will miss exactly this point. Her blunt, blank affect belongs to the character, not the performer, and is part of the film’s calculated tease. Ms. Kusama puts Ms. Fox’s lithe physique right in your face and then demands to know what you think you’re looking at.
Before a fateful run-in with an evil indie-rock band (led by Adam Brody) turns her into a bloodthirsty, bile-spewing succubus, Jennifer is the embodiment of a series of high school clichés that almost entirely obscure her inner life. She’s a mean girl, a bad girl, a popular girl, a dream girl — the one every other girl envies and every boy wants. But she is not the heroine of the movie, and it is not her predicament that makes it so interesting and original.
The real girl in the middle of this bloodbath — which overtakes a small town in Minnesota called Devil’s Kettle — is Needy, short for Anita. Played by Amanda Seyfried, she is Jennifer’s best friend, and if Ms. Fox brazenly incarnates teenage girl clichés, Ms. Seyfried slyly subverts them. Needy is sensible, studious and bespectacled, but hardly a nerd. She has a good-natured boyfriend named Chip (Johnny Simmons), and she seems generally well adjusted: curious about sex but not obsessed with it, adventurous but not reckless, prudent but not timid. She is also tough, kind and funny.
Needy is also driven past bewilderment to the brink of madness by what happens to Jennifer, who lures one young man after another to his doom. The jock, the goth and others are so bedazzled by her attention that they are blind to her murderous intentions. She has been similarly fooled and abused, but “Jennifer’s Body” is not only a fantasy of revenge against the predatory male sex, though the ultimate enactment of that revenge is awfully satisfying. The antagonism and attraction between boys and girls is a relatively straightforward (if, in this case, grisly) matter; the real terror, the stuff of Needy’s nightmares, lies in the snares and shadows of female friendship.
The relationship between Needy and Jennifer is rivalrous, sisterly, undermining, sadomasochistic, treacherous and tender. “Hell,” Needy asserts early on, “is a teenage girl.” If Jean-Paul Sartre were in the databank of allusions Ms. Cody has supplied her with, she might have specified that hell is other teenage girls. The inferno consumes everything around it, very nearly including the movie itself.
The palette is dark and sanguinary. The dialogue is an unstable mélange of screeches and howls and the compulsively savvy, provincial-hipster babble that is for Ms. Cody what terse Chicago indirection is for David Mamet and long-winded analysis of cultural trivia is for Quentin Tarantino.
“Cheese and fries!” Needy exclaims, though at other times she is happy to utter all manner of blasphemy. “Move on dot org,” Jennifer says, perhaps attempting to top an already legendary nonsensical non sequitur from Ms. Cody’s “Juno” screenplay: “Honest to blog.”
Honestly, though, “Juno,” mannered and self-conscious as it was, gave us, in the person of Ellen Page, a young heroine with a sharp tongue, a good heart and questionable judgment — a character who was smart, surprising and, in the end, hard to resist. Ms. Kusama’s first film, “Girlfight,” did something similar with its bruising, bruised protagonist, played by Michelle Rodriguez. And Needy, our Virgil in Ms. Cody and Ms. Kusama’s tour of teenage hell, so nimbly personified by Ms. Seyfried, belongs in this company. She’s the main reason to see “Jennifer’s Body.”
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