Brutal Honesty

You have to love a film with such an unabashed double pun in the name. Bone Lake pulls it off: bone as in boner, and bone as in something to get broken. Yet this erotic survival horror isn’t afraid of these big, saucy swings, as displayed in a pre-credit sequence that involves a lot of nudity and some very innovatively targeted crossbow bolts.

“Erotic survival horror” isn’t a big genre – Bone Lake may indeed be it – so it’s not surprising that Sage (Harrison, Malignant) and Diego (Pigossi, Gen V) wouldn’t think they’re in that kind of plight. If anything, their life together is more of a domestic drama, with her becoming the only wage earner as he decides to take a sabbatical from his community college teaching job. The stresses are there even if they haven’t quite fractured yet, but extra torque is applied when Cin (Nechita) and Will (Roe) barrel into their lives. Younger, hotter, less inhibited, more adventurous, everything Sage and Diego are not. The only thing they have in common is that they’ve ended up double-booked at the same luxurious rented lake house on the same weekend. Would it really be that hard to share (wink wink)?

Intimacy and inappropriate behavior become part of the weekend, but it’s hard to tell: Are Sage and Diego misreading the room when Cin wears a little too little for comfort, or Will talks about being exposed in nature? Maybe they should just leave everything untouched, like that mysterious locked door at the end of the corridor …

Of course, the big question is when exactly the door – literal and metaphorical – is opened and all hell – both emotional and life-threatening – breaks loose. But there’s also a question of how extreme the shift will be, and fortunately director Mercedes Bryce Morgan (Fixation, Spoonful of Sugar) gets the balance between slick and sick-making just right. There’s a delicious lasciviousness to the couples as they intermingle, with Sage and Diego fumbling through their neuroses, Cin drifting through like Paolo Sorrentino’s latest obsession, and Will smiling with a slight leer, a lost Franco brother with better manners and a knack for twisting the psychosexual knife.

Unabashedly warped and horny, Morgan knows exactly when to set off the depth charges lurking in the waters of Bone Lake, making its big, filthy reveal feel like the inevitable result of the characters’ urges. There’s a subtle suggestion of violence in all that emotional and sexual turmoil, just inches along that pain/pleasure spectrum. When Morgan slips over that line, all those sensual red soft furnishings and flesh tones become suppurating greens and chilly blues, and the depravity becomes more entertainingly warped. The 1960s sexual exploration, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice-esque vibe becomes something more like the mournfully sadistic pleasures of Jean Rollin, plunging grand guignol panache into a diagnosis of depravity. Yet even as the more subtle manipulations explode into a suitably cathartic and over-the-top chase sequence, Morgan never lets go of the core question of trust, and whether the years of knowing just so much about each other have eroded what Sage and Diego have. If Bone Lake didn’t have that grounded relationship aspect, those insights that are smarter than the average stalker-slasher flick, then it wouldn’t really survive that inevitable gory resolution. Not that Morgan is recommending that couples undergo a weekend in hell just to work out their issues: Rather, she’s just really prepared to put the “brutal” into brutal honesty.

Bone Lake

2025, R, 94 mins. Directed by Mercedes Bryce Morgan. Starring Maddie Harrison, Marco Pigossi, Alex Roe, Andra Nechita.

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

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