Bone Lake (2025)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Sage and Diego are a young couple on a weekend away, renting an enormous rural lake house, and he's about to pop the question. But we learn he's an aspiring writer, who quit his job and is currently unemployed while chasing his dream. And she's an editor supporting them both with no small irritation at his foolishness. They're in that rut of a relationship that's gotten too comfortable and safe, taken for granted and unintentional, evidenced by their intimacy issues and unspoken resentments and expectations. As the story progresses, we learn that they really don't have a very healthy relationship and probably shouldn't be getting engaged. But the horrors in store for them at Bone Lake will change them, if they can survive.

After a jarring opening scene I'd rather forget, the latest indie feature from Mercedes Bryce Morgan starts promisingly. Another couple materializes at the house -- mansion, really, so how are these pretty young things affording such luxury? -- by name of Will and Cin (short for Cinnamon, inexplicably), claiming to have the same rental via a different website. Compromising the double-booking by agreeing that both couples should enjoy the place, it's clear to us they're in for a bad time. We've seen Barbarian recently with its own double-booking first act. And to have that initial premise set up a mansion filled with other key horror motif, I was sure this was about to become a new version of The Cabin in the Woods. 

A smorgasbord of narrative options seem intentionally presented by the film, like little red herrings for the meta fan. Its inspirations and references are evocative, if not always clear. My notes of this film are almost entirely of other titles that I thought of while watching Bone Lake. Its Barbarian premise leads to hints of The Strangers, The Beach House, Psycho, The Gift, Significant Other, Last House on the Left, Friday the 13th, Eden Lake, Together, Funny Games, The Rental, and Speak No Evil. Heck, I don't think it's unfair to add Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Flowers in the Attic. And while those are mostly handsome titles to be linked with, it's not a good sign my notes include little else. Where is the gumption to stand out, to do your own thing?

Bone Lake suffers, ultimately, from a disappointing lack of imagination. Will this be a haunting from the lake shown repeatedly to be a graveyard of sorts? A home invasion by violent strangers or a silent stalker a la Jason or Michael? Are the horny couples going to go mad, do something bad? To say the filmmakers choose the most obvious, predictable, and boring option -- of so many cool ones -- is putting things mildly. 

Like the '80s suburban erotic thrillers it clearly wants to emulate, this film capitalizes on a vulnerable normative couple being terrorized by a fiendish outsider. In this case, the fiends are not the obvious outsiders because they look so much like insiders. And in fact, they are, which seems the only decent want to make sense of this otherwise deeply conservative and cautious film. Refusing to engage with its own characters, the screenplay careens wildly into dialogue-heavy scenes that effectively say nothing while forcing its actors to navigate circular and stilted lines. Even that concession doesn't absolve the actors, though, who are very pretty but act as if they're playing to the balcony in an opera hall, broad and flat.

Perhaps most egregious in my mind is the constant promise of eroticism in this material that is never realized. Despite their looks, the actors display shockingly little nudity. A bizarre lack of queerness exacerbates the main problem, which is that these two couples are treated so blasé by the screenplay, so thoroughly not outré, that my imagination preferred to make up its own story about what they'd do to and with each other, horrific or otherwise. As such, by film's end I was mostly just annoyed by the supposedly sympathetic characters' constant stupid decisions and irrational choices to not communicate with each other. Not thrilled, not entertained. Annoyed. They spill their beans to the manifestly, insistently creepy other couple while refusing to even speak honestly with each other about what is necessary for their own survival in this situation. 

The film is capably shot and looks handsome enough, but from its meek treatment of sex (there is literally a sex room the size of my apartment that doesn't get used) to its conscious choice not to entertain other horrors it itself introduces (there's a room for monitoring surveillance tech riddling the estate, and another with some spiritualist or satanic ritual tools, and a lake containing literally dozens of skeletons), I simply can't help but feel cheated out of a story -- any story -- that might have been meaningful or interesting. Which, really, is the bare minimum.