Worst thing you’ll see all week: Body

Body stars two very good actresses and Alexandra Turshen. The best part of the movie is when Turshen lets loose with a full throated scream into someone else’s face and the movie just cuts to black. The intensity of her scream and the abruptness of the cut are chilling. They belong in a better movie.

Unfortunately, the talented, winsome, and frail Helen Rogers will duplicate the moment and it won’t work. Partly because Body doesn’t cut away. Mostly because Rogers isn’t up to the full-throated intensity of Turshen’s scream. Rogers’ strength is her expressiveness and, ironically, her vulnerability, both used to powerful effect in “The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger”, one of the best shorts in the 2012 horror anthology V/H/S.

The problem with Body, one of those thrillers about otherwise reasonable people making bad decisions, is that the bad decisions make no sense. Body hopes you’ll believe that these bad decisions result from the force of Turshen’s personality as the alpha female. But being blandly pretty and merely loud don’t qualify you for alpha status. So the script makes its absurd leaps, while Rogers and Lauren Molina, the other very good actress, gamely do their best to bring you along. It isn’t enough. Some leaps are simply too far to make. Body disappears into a chasm of implausibility.

Body is currently in limited release and will be available for VOD on December 29.