If films like Kalifornia and Speak No Evil have taught us anything, it’s that letting a couple of exciting strangers into your life is not going to fix your relationship problems.
So when aspiring author Diego (Marco Pigossi) and his editor girlfriend Sage (Maddie Hasson) decide it’s OK to split their palatial short-term rental with bright young things Cin (Andra Nechita) and Will (Alex Roe), of course the evening isn’t going to end with a nice game of gin rummy and polite good nights. The big question for twisty thriller Bone Lake is whether it ends up with minds, hearts, or bodies being tortured – or all three.
There’s no doubt that Diego and Sage have had their fair share of tensions and strife, and superficially they seem to have worked through them. After all, they’ve been together since college, and have had to upend their clearly established lives to help fulfill Diego’s “great American novel” dream before he becomes another middle-aged community college lecturer. But writer/director Mercedes Bryce Morgan isn’t letting them off the hook quite so easily. Returning to Fantastic Fest after her last feature, Spoonful of Sugar, played the festival in 2022, she uses the script by Joshua Friedlander to deviously pick at the frayed edges of a relationship that’s getting a little threadbare.
Like the best of such relationship psychodrama, everything that could doom the couple was already in their very extensive baggage (literal and metaphorical), and Morgan slowly unpacks it. Well, that is until Will commits an egregious betrayal of Diego’s unsure friendship – one that the older man can’t reveal without making himself look like the bad guy. Moments like this are what makes Bone Lake a fine addition to the genre, but it has one particular trick up its sleeve in the cast.
They’re across-the-board excellent, especially Roe who plays Will as a more roguish, less bro-y version of the kind of characters that Dave Franco was getting typecast in for years. However, in her second collaboration with Hasson (the first being 2022’s Fixation), Morgan finds the performance that really ties the narrative together and gives it added depth and complexity. Hasson dispatches of the need for swaths of expository or explanatory conversation with a sideways look or a purse-lipped smile. In a story in which open communication is at a premium, those moments fill in all the gaps – or rather, make them clearer, so we’ll be able to see the perilous cracks even as Diego and Sage try to paper over them.
Yet it’s not simply tragedy and emotional abuse. There’s something sweaty and sexual at play, with Will and Cin a little bit too comfortable in their own skins around the more restrained Sage and Diego, their conversations verging on the edge of flirtatious, their inquiries maybe a little too intrusive. It’s all the more worrying since the house on Bone Lake has a sinister history, but there’s something delightfully warped about how Will and Cin keep distracting the older couple – even making the most obviously crude and frattish joke about how Bone Lake really got its name (wink wink).
Bone Lake is wickedly fun rather than measuredly incisive, so when Morgan finally lets Will and Cin’s mask drop (as it inevitably must) then there’s no surprise that the psychodrama becomes more psycho, less drama. Yet she has enough wit to ensure that the final, purposeful shot leaves the film with a memorable kink in its tale.
Bone Lake
USA, 2024, 94 min.
World Premiere
Tuesday 24, 11:35pm
Follow all the Chronicle’s 2024 Fantastic Fest coverage.
This article appears in September 20 • 2024.
