Bone tomahawk movie#
Craig Zahler is a fascinating creator with three films under his belt to date: Bone Tomahawk, its follow up (and his greatest achievement) Brawl In Cell Block 99, a pared back, ultra-stylised descent that takes as many cues from German Expressionism as it does from gritty 1970's crime cinema, and his most recent effort Dragged Across Concrete - a movie that is perhaps attempting to say something about institutionalised racism and corruption, but is ultimately a depressing, ugly and morally cloudy experience. Throughout all three, and especially with this film, he balances an admirable ear for dialogue (his characters generally speak in an exaggerated, musical cadence and are prone to poetic flourish whenever possible), and the patience to create slow-burn ticking clock scenarios for his subjects and us to creep through. There is violence - with Zahler there is always violence, but it’s sparing use and transgressively shocking delivery is in the service of the slow, slow build to a terrible, inevitable revelation. It’s the lynchpin but not the focus. Make no mistake, in its bones, this is a monster movie, the protagonists and ourselves are just unaware of the fact until it is far too late. This is not a film that examines frontier life, colonialism or race relations with any level of subtlety. If this movie owes a debt to anything, it would be Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter – another Western that hovers in the zone of being not quite supernatural, but such an eventual perversion of reality that the mind recoils at what it’s being shown. The experiment here - the blending of Western tropes with a survivalist horror movie element that slowly comes to the fore, is a mixture that works with terrible efficiency. What is most rewarding about Bone Tomahawk is how it’s willing to take its time. It embraces the endless swaths of space needed to be covered by pilgrims in bygone days, the time it takes to traverse that space, and the dread uncertainty of being far from the tenuous safety of home and ever closer to an unnamable dread.Īs we’ve seen, the Western is far from gone, and in recent years its full potential to tell a range of stories, from the bittersweet Sisters Brothers, the looney tunes Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Jennifer Kent’s primal The Nightingale or Kelly Reichardt’s stunning First Cow, we’ve seen new ways of looking at a genre many might have considered tapped of its potential.
Advised by a local tracker that the perpetrators are most likely a deeply feared clan of cave dwellers, commonly labelled as Troglodytes, antagonistically separate from all others, be they indigenous or more recent arrivals, notorious for their cruelty and terrifying semi-mystical reputation, a group of four men head out on the heels of these ghosts, into a great valley of uncertainty and peril.Īnd an entertaining party of travellers it is - Patrick Wilson, providing the kind of effortless charm that a grip of movies from the last ten years have hung their hats on, the always reliable Richard Jenkins, a venomous Matthew Fox, and of course Kurt Russell bringing the gravitas that a lifetime of brooding screen machismo has earned. It’s the 1890s, and the small American frontier town of Bright Hope has found itself the victim of a mysterious assault in the dead of night. Citizens have been abducted, horses stolen, and a hole left in the heart of what by all accounts appears to be a small oasis in the midst of a country in turmoil.
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