Snatchers (2019).
The Stage.
When a high school senior has sex with her boyfriend for the first time, she starts feeling a little weird. She wakes up two days later and appears to be nine months pregnant, and things only get weirder from there.
The Review.
The film kicks off in reproductive science class and this group of four girls are ignoring the lesson talking about a party that’s happening that weekend at one of their houses. Our main character, Sara, makes fun of another girl in class named Hayley - the nerd - and then we see her ex-boyfriend, Skyler walk into class. They broke up because she wasn’t ready for sex and he spent the summer in Mexico studying abroad. In his opinion, the breakup was a good thing, because over the summer his priorities changed. We later find out he really only has one priority - sex. In an effort to win him back, Sara goes to his house and they do it, an act that comes with dire consequences. Two days later, she wakes up and is apparently 9 months pregnant. The rest of the film sees Sara teaming up with Hailey to workshop a solution to her…growing problem…because she doesn’t want her friends or her mom to know what she’s going through.
The comedy side of the movie really worked for me. The main characters had great chemistry together and I loved that they played up how clueless they both were about the reproductive system. Both Mary Nepi and Gabrielle Elyse have great comedic chops and kind of reminded me of a young Bri Larsen and Maya Rudolph. Some of the solutions they land on are hilariously stupid but are also things I might have thought up at 17. Most of the side characters are one note caricatures, but they’re funny enough that I didn’t care. Skyler was a standout. He plays the high school sex-crazed fuck boy so well and when we get to see the video he made for Spanish class, it’s top tier douchebaggery that’s really really funny.
It’s also an extremely goofy, super gory creature feature. The effects looked like they were done practically and the filmmakers were able to accomplish a lot with what I assume was a pretty low budget. There are a few massacres in the film and it definitely doesn’t pull back on the gore. There’s tons of blood and guts and the movie feels like it’s got real stakes. Even the opening credits sequence is awesome. The sound design feels like a horror parody, with loud thumps and score crescendos at all the predictable moments, but because of its intended vibe you probably won’t be rolling your eyes but rather leaning further into the fun.
The End.
Premarital sex and budding womanhood are themes that have been tackled hundreds of times on the silver screen in basically every genre and with plenty of incredibly different portrayals - a recent example is the Pixar film Turning Red, which illustrates the changing body transformation it’s teenager is going through by changing her into a giant, fluffy Panda. Snatchers ups the ages and the ante. Sara’s young mother in the film also has an arc that struck a chord with me, because as a parent, you never want your child to make the same mistakes you did.
While I don’t think this film has earned a place in the genre cinema hall of fame, I certainly think that if you’re into horror comedy films you’ll have a really good time with this.
