Alexander Turshen in Body (Oscilloscope Laboratories)

Body is reminiscent of an episode of an old Alfred Hitchcock TV show. (I’m not aging myself here. It aired long before I was born). It has a quick, concise high-concept idea that can play out in an hour. It also barely rates as a feature, coming in at 75 minutes, and for the most part, that’s a good thing. There’s not much padding going on here.

On Christmas Eve, Holly (Helen Rogers), Cali (Alexandra Turshen), and Mel (Lauren Molina) are having a typically boring girls’ night drinking and smoking weed when Cali suggests they pop over to her uncle’s place about an hour away. The uncle takes a holiday vacation every year so the place is vacant. So, they pile into the car and head over to what turns out to be a mansion full of awesome things: pool tables, pinball machines, and some pretty sweet liquor. The girls party it up until Holly finds evidence that perhaps this is not the uncle’s place after all. And then the groundskeeper shows up and complicates things by getting accidentally pushed down the stairs, and, voila, you have the title of the film.

After that, is the moral dilemma whether or not to call the cops? Hiding the body? Telling the truth? Body is perhaps a not-so-deliberately middle-brow film. It is very respectable. You’ll get your gore eventually, but tasteful gore, and the characters are all fairly likable, believable types until one is revealed as a sociopath, and even then she’s pretty much straight from the mean girl playbook. But the movie’s attempt at creating some moral depth is somewhat facile. One salivates over what someone such as Bergman might have done with the material on one hand (there is plenty of philosophical meat on this bone and Bergman knew his way around horror—Hour of the Wolf) and someone a little more garish like Stephen King on the other. Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen consistently tread the middle ground, which causes the scenario to lose a good deal of its potency.

The acting, though, is quite lovely. Helen Rogers scores as the most morally sound of the trio. She has an offbeat charm to her as the quiet one who is constantly and anxiously observing everything around her. Alexandra Turshen brings a frighteningly intense quality as the alpha female of the group, and Lauren Molina does an impressive job as the girl who just wants to shrink into the wallpaper when the bad shit goes down. Lastly, the great indie horror stalwart Larry Fessenden does wonders with a part that requires him to literally not move.