Her Best Feature

A teenage girl is horrified when her best friend becomes a demon in 2009's Jennifer's Body, which Roger Ebert described as "Twilight for boys." Which is a really funny thing to read at the end of a long Wikipedia entry in which its director and screenwriter spend a lot of time talking about how they wanted to make this a feminist subversion of a male dominated genre. I enjoyed the movie. Its screenplay by Diablo Cody is peppy and occasionally insightful and it's always a pleasure seeing Amanda Seyfried.

It's funny she's supposed to be the unsexy nerd of the duo comprised of herself and Megan Fox. Megan Fox is pretty but, for my money, Seyfried is by far the more beautiful. But in any case, they're both beautiful girls which makes it odd that the movie tries anything like the dynamic it does: the popular hot girl and her mousy best friend. Well, Seyfried did dress as a mouse in Mean Girls.

Her character's nickname in this movie is "Needy", an indication of the abuse she cheerfully puts up with from Fox, the titular Jennifer. The two survive a fire at a tavern that kills nearly everyone else. The band playing at the venue is headed by the evil Nikolai Wolf (Adam Brody) who lures the already obnoxiously narcissistic Jennifer into the woods to perform an unspeakable demoniac ritual to upgrade her into a real demon.

I liked how the populace of the town builds a false narrative around the fire in which the band, which fled the scene almost immediately, is cast as heroes. It reminded me of Donnie Darko and Ghost World and I sympathised with Needy for having to be surrounded by idiots.

The film supports two alternate interpretations, one in which Jennifer becomes a succubus, killing one boy after another to maintain her power, and another in which Needy is losing her mind and turns her friend's repulsive personality into hallucinated demoniac antics. There are things which go unexplained, like the fact that Needy seems to have a psychic connexion with Jennifer. This kind of reminded me of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt but mostly the story reminded me of Carmilla and American Werewolf in London.

Jennifer's Body is available on Netflix.