“Bone Lake” is an erotic thriller without eroticism or thrills
Directed by Mercedes Bryce Morgan
Written by Joshua Friedlander
Starring Maddie Hasson, Alex Roe, Andra Nechita, and Marco Pigossi
Bone Lake opens with a naked couple running through the woods, chased by a hooded figure with a crossbow. As far as movies trying to communicate their essence with their opening images go, it’s maybe as far from subtle as you can get, and that’s before an extreme close-up captures a bolt being fired through the man’s penis in the provocateur’s equivalent of a middle schooler bragging about their dad letting them stay up as long as they want. You’re not being edgy; you’re being pat. If nothing else, though, it trains you to expect graphic violence, graphic nudity, and no shortage of horror chills. Our heroes will be vulnerable, and they will be hunted. It is, it turns out, an empty promise. What follows could charitably be described as an erotic thriller, but that’s not for any presence of eroticism or thrills. Rather, you’re merely left scrambling for the words to describe it beyond simply “dull.”
As the actual story begins, longtime couple Sage (Maddie Hasson, The Recruit) and Diego (Marco Pigossi, Invisible City) arrive at a gorgeous mansion for a vacation only to meet another couple, Will (Alex Roe, Siren) and Cin (Andra Nechita, Marvel’s Inhumans) who have seemingly double-booked the same experience and agree to split the place with them. As time goes on, Will and Cin gradually become more and more overt in their desire for Sage and Diego, at which point about fifteen minutes of screen time have passed and you immediately guess both twists. Hypothetically, the draw of the film could then come from watching the noose tighten around our leads while they remain ignorant of the danger, but that would require the talent necessary to maintain a tension throughout, and neither Bone Lake’s writers or director can make that happen.
We quickly find that Diego is putting his relationship with Sage at risk for his career, frustrating her, and neither of them are willing to talk about the problems it’s causing them. Through this, the characters’ inability to communicate is made part of the story rather than left as a lazy artifact of the horror genre. Insofar as Bone Lake has a theme, it’s that: the importance of openness with your partner and the tragedy that can arise from staying silent for fear of rocking the boat. If that combined with the premise sounds similar to 2022’s Speak No Evil (and its 2024 English-language remake), that’s because much of Bone Lake plays as a slightly eroticized rip-off of Christian Tafdrup’s film, down to virtually identically staged twists. Is this likely a case of parallel thought rather than plagiarism? Of course. Couples playing mind games with each other has been supple territory for a thriller since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but at least those other movies have the common decency to offer up thrills as they trod similar ground.
Instead, much of Bone Lake is embarrassingly low rent. The editing is abysmal throughout, and not in any one particular way. Shots that are meant to follow each other chronologically contain wildly different temperatures of performance: a character in the final act goes from striding down a corridor furiously to dancing their way down that same corridor casually and finally back to anger in the course of three shots. Coverage in a pivotal scene seems to be straight-up missing, with characters calling out details that we don’t see. Sound tracks audibly hop from one shot to the next, leaving dialogue that is clearly the product of multiple takes rather than a single performance made fluid in the edit. Dialogue is ADRed when an actor is in the frame and we can see that his mouth doesn’t match the words we’re hearing.
Even when the editing and sound reach a baseline of competence, the rest of the film stylistically all over the place, with much of it playing out staidly only for director Mercedes Bryce Morgan (Spoonful of Sugar) to suddenly swing the camera in a wide 360, sweep through a room with a Ouija board that goes completely unexplained, give us a Breaking Bad-esque shot from the point of view of an object, or shoot a sequence with a fantastical soft focus and glow. Quick pans, oners, time lapses, crash zooms; nothing is too far afield to find itself grafted onto whatever Morgan has decided she wants her movie to be in that moment. It leaves you wondering if she isn’t conscious of how obvious the script’s twists are and is throwing flourishes at you in a failed attempt at obfuscation. The genre finds itself victim to the same slew of random directorial impulses. If the first two-thirds play as an erotic thriller, later scenes resemble a slasher or a grindhouse flick, usually only for a moment or two before something else takes their place.
The third act gets some mileage out of the idea that some characters were more cognizant of their surroundings than they originally let on. It’s foreshadowed admittedly well and plays into what becomes the funniest scene of the whole ordeal, even as the self-awareness it exhibits is nowhere to be found in the preceding hour or the next twenty minutes. Likewise, a late in the game fight mset to “Sex and Violence” by The Exploited is more playful and tonally consistent than any of the stylistic hand-waving that came before it. Outside of that, moments of true pleasure are few and far between. The movie that showed you a close-up of a dick in its first minute becomes bafflingly chaste for having so hokily held itself out as something taboo. Without even cheap thrills, it feels twice as long as its ninety-five minutes.
Rating: C-
Bone Lake is now playing in theaters. You can watch the trailer here.
