REVIEW: No Hard Feelings For ‘Hard Feelings’

Hard Feelings is a German-language Netflix Original movie by Granz Henman. It follows two best friends in high school who have never had sex but are one day struck by lightning together and suddenly their genitals talk to them and will only shut up if they lose their virginity.

I worried that a movie with this absurd premise with an opening scene including incessant mocking chants of “Charly no dick” to the main character would be vulgar or rife with a kind of sophomoric humor I couldn’t get behind. Fortunately, I was wrong off the bat. While there are plenty of penis jokes and moments of crude humor, the movie itself is a bit more mature than that. It’s actually a surprisingly good movie about the shame we have for our bodies and our inability to speak openly about things that happen to every single one of those bodies.

Hard Feelings is about bullying, body shaming, and sex shaming, all of which are very explicit in the text. Its characters and the specific embarrassments they endure are far less memorable than the genitals that talk back to them. The genitals push their respective owners into very stereotypical teenage experiences of awkward one-liners, being rude to potential partners, or being taken for granted by them. There’s also a good running bit about how “vulva” is the more accurate term to use in this situation.

But thankfully, none of the humor feels overly crude or exploitative. You get one small shot of either kind of genital and that’s it, thankfully. And the movie does have some, if not awkward, queer characters who at least implore viewers to remember that everyone goes through puberty but it doesn’t always have to imply the same kind of attraction for everybody.

Frankly, there isn’t a whole lot more to be said. The soundtrack is a bop, the characters are forgettable, the humor isn’t necessarily crude, and I was pleasantly surprised by the sincere conclusion and the choices the characters make by the end. There’s a whole subplot about Charly’s parents potentially splitting up that reminds you sex and bodies are still uncomfortable even for adults and that they shouldn’t be.

Otherwise, it’s an innocuous movie with a good moral. Not something I’d go far out of my way to recommend, but perhaps would suggest to a teenager going through the awkward throughs of puberty.

Hard Feelings is streaming now on Netflix.