TL;DR: The Body review: Netflix’s 2004-set Catholic school horror swaps whodunit thrills for faith, guilt and repression. Superb performances and a sharp Y2K critique carry it, but murky plotting and an unearned cliffhanger hold it back.
Netflix has spent years feeding us teen thrillers built like escape rooms, where every episode ends on a twist and every character is secretly a suspect. The Body goes the other way, and I respect it a lot for that. Set in 2004 and running eight episodes, the series from showrunners Quinn Shephard (Under the Bridge) and Gina Gammell follows a Catholic school dance team, the St. Marks Lions, whose Halloween initiation goes badly wrong. Their newest recruit, the devout Grace (Sofia Wylie), is put through a mock Satanic rite fuelled by ecstasy, and by the end of the night she is in a coma. What follows is less a whodunit than a long, uncomfortable look at what guilt, faith and fear do to a group of girls who have been taught to perform perfection at all costs.
The title works on two levels, and that double meaning is the key to the whole show. “The Body” is a theological idea the girls hear about in class, but it is also Grace herself, lying motionless while everyone around her projects their hopes, sins and ambitions onto her. Think of her as a Laura Palmer figure in reverse: not dead, not gone, but silent, and somehow more powerful for it. When teammates start having visions of Grace, the show refuses to tell you whether you are watching a miracle, a drug comedown, a stress response or something darker. If you need answers delivered on schedule, this ambiguity will drive you up the wall.
The Body season one cares more about people than puzzles
The setup offers plenty of suspects and theories, from the party drugs to Lisbeth’s unsettling brother Leo (Jackson Kelly) to the black mold creeping through the school chapel. But the series treats those threads as pressure points rather than a mystery box. The real story begins when team co-captain Anya (Kristina Bogic) and outsider Lisbeth (Geena Meszaros) find Grace and make a choice to keep the night’s details from the authorities. That single decision ripples through everything, and the show is far more interested in what the secret does to people than in solving what happened.
This is where The Body will divide its audience. The pacing is deliberate and the plot occasionally gets muddy, with some threads feeling underdeveloped and others simply left hanging. The season closes on a cliffhanger that raises new questions instead of settling old ones, and I can easily see viewers feeling short-changed after eight hours of investment. What saves it is that each major character does reach a meaningful emotional endpoint, so the season lands as a character study even when it fumbles as a thriller. It is closer to Yellowjackets in its quieter, interior moments than to anything on the CW.
The cast of The Body carries every dark turn
The young ensemble is the strongest reason to watch. Kristina Bogic gives Anya a brittle, trapped quality that makes her more than the typical queen bee. She is pulled between her religion, her community’s expectations, her hollow relationship with swim star Steven (Orlando Norman) and her feelings for fellow co-captain Elise (Sara Boustany). Bogic and Boustany make that on-and-off relationship the emotional backbone of the series, and it captures the show’s central idea better than any supernatural vision: these girls are constantly hiding who they really are to survive.
Geena Meszaros has the hardest job as Lisbeth, a girl who begins as the overlooked outsider and becomes a ruthless operator, using the team’s shared secret as leverage to climb the social ladder. The writing does not fully justify how far she goes, even with glimpses of a brutal home life under her abusive mother (Louisa Krause), but Meszaros sells the menace and the panic underneath it. Shirley Chen is quietly excellent as Grace’s anxious best friend Maddie, whose arc toward spiritual searching is one of the season’s most rewarding. Marcel Ruiz brings welcome levity as the perpetually wasted Tyler, while Nnamdi Asomugha, as principal and Grace’s uncle Father Franklin, and Motell Foster, as her father Michael, ground the adult side of the story in belief and grief.
A Y2K setting that bites instead of comforts
Most 2000s throwbacks are designed to make you feel warm and fuzzy about flip phones and low-rise everything. The Body uses that same era as a cage. The rhinestones, the pop needle drops (yes, there is a Kelly Clarkson moment) and the brand-name fashion all exist to remind you how narrow the options were for teenage girls in that culture, especially queer ones and religious ones. I found that refreshing in a streaming landscape stuffed with nostalgia that treats the recent past as an unproblematic theme park. The show has some fun with its period details, but its real argument is that the “good old days” were not good for everyone.
Visually, the series leans heavily into shadow and murk, which suits its oppressive mood like the fog in Silent Hill suits that town’s sins. The downside is practical: some scenes are so dark that you may find yourself fiddling with your TV’s brightness settings. The atmosphere is consistently strong, though, and the series feels more connected to the gloomy, uncompromising coming-of-age stories of the 2000s than to the glossy teen dramas of the same decade. It takes adolescent pain seriously, and that is rarer than it should be.
Verdict
The Body is a bold, moody and often brilliant series that occasionally trips over its own plot. Its cast is phenomenal, its take on Y2K culture is sharp and refreshingly unsentimental, and its themes of faith, sexuality, guilt and conformity are handled with real intelligence. On the other hand, the storytelling can be thin, some character turns are not fully earned, and the cliffhanger finale prioritises future seasons over satisfying payoff. If you want a fast, twisty teen mystery, look elsewhere. If you want something atmospheric, uncomfortable and emotionally honest, The Body is one of the most distinctive things Netflix has released this year.