The opening of Mercedes Bryce Morgan’s Bone Lake, scripted by Joshua Friedlander, resonates with the beginning of the Old Testament, as a naked man and woman (Clayton Spencer and Eliane Reis) are seen running hand in hand through an Edenic woodland – except that they are in fact being hunted, and the Book of Genesis certainly never featured a crossbow bolt through the scrotum. Now indoors, the couple’s scarred corpses are laid out in costume, in grotesque imitation of the painting on the wall behind them – and we cut to would-be novelist Diego (Marco Pigossi) reading an excerpt from his latest writing to his long-term girlfriend Sage (Maddie Hasson) who is, literally and metaphorically, in the driving seat. It is not clear at this point if the hunt shown at the start was a real event, or a representation of what Diego has written, in a film where the boundaries between actuality and its artistic imitation are already breaking down – but Sage does comment that what she has heard is “just feeling a little bit, like, gratuitous.”
Diego and Sage are heading to a beautiful lakeside rental for the weekend, where they are “looking to spice things up” in their relationship, and maybe work through a few problems, before they move on to the next phase of their lives together. For Diego has quit his community college teaching job to commit to full-time writing, while Sage has abandoned her beloved journalism and taken on a less satisfying if more lucrative editorial rôle to support Diego in this change. Diego secretly plans to propose to Sage in this idyllic spot, and to cement their future together in a time of transition, but there are also real tensions between them – financial and sexual – which need to be addressed. So this trip is also a form of couple’s therapy – with the requisite confessional sessions, trust exercises and rôle play coming from a very unexpected quarter.
This luxurious Paradise is about to be visited by Sin – or at least by the homophonous Cin (Andra Nechita) and her boyfriend Will (Alex Roe) who, owing to an accidental double booking that comes with ominous echoes of Zach Cregger’s Barbarian (2022), agree to share space with the older couple, and to get to know them a lot more intimately over the next few days. Yet as Cin reveals, the name of this place is not a euphemism for intercourse, but rather derives from the human bones found washed ashore there in the Fifties – and later, after breaking into a locked room, the four will find newspaper clippings suggesting more disappearances at the waterfront property. Meanwhile, we know what Diego and Sage do not: that there are several cars submerged under the dock. So while the seductive games that Will and Cin play with Diego and Sage, testing their fidelity and tempting them with treacherous transgressions, play out like the beats of an erotic thriller in the mould of Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon (1992), Mike Nichols’ Closer (2004) or Angelina Jolie’s By the Sea (2015), there is always, underlying these sweaty, sexy tropes, the insidious threat of a more visceral danger.
The latter will eventually manifest itself in a messy climax of knives, axes, pokers, electric saws, rotor blades and other penetrative toys which will see Diego and Sage, for the first time in years, coming together – even if the final shot of them reveals less ecstatic jouissance than blank tristesse, evocative, surreally, of the end of another Mike Nichols film, The Graduate (1967). It is almost as though, now that these lovers have briefly got the spice they were seeking, they are stuck as much with each other as they were with their unwanted guests, and can only look forward to all the same dissatisfactions and disappointments that they had before. Even if they have learnt a few tricks along the way about forcing padlocks open, they have been long since shut out of their initial Eden, and Paradise seems forever lost, so that, like the blood-spattered, momentarily triumphant Jennifer Hills speeding down the river at the end of I Spit on Your Grave (1978), these two appear to be headed where there can be no lasting good. Still, at least Diego ought to be able to bring these out-of-bounds experiences to his art, and to become a less banal, if still gratuitous writer.
Bone Lake had its UK première at FrightFest 2025, Sunday 24 August
