FrightFest review – Bone Lake

FrightFest review – Bone Lake

This opens with a naked couple being pursued Most Dangerous Game-style through the woods – and the guy abandoning the girl in a doomed attempt to evade death … which comes swift and gorily, with one emasculating shock image calculated by director Mercedes Bryce Morgan to make men in the audience wince.  This segues into would-be writer Diego (Marco Pigossi) reading his latest work in the car to his longterm girlfriend Sage (Maddie Hasson), who has just promised to support them financially – he’s quit his teaching job to write a novel.  They’ve booked a lavish Air BnB-type mansion on the eponymous lake, where Diego plans to propose marriage … though, after they’ve settled in for a possible ‘clothes-free weekend’, another couple show up, who say they’ve also booked the place.  Will (Alex Roe) and Cin (Andra Nechita) are hot, charming, generous and creepy-flirty in a way which sets off alarm bells – we’ve seen too many Air BnB horror films by now not to sense twists a way ahead, and for once the norms have too and become guarded around their new friends.

That the weekend rental is such a lavish place is ominous enough, not to mention the rooms secured with easily tricked padlocks which suggest different sub-genres … a sex-play dungeon and a ghost story ouija board layout.  Besides many Air BnB horror films – Diego says he checked the ‘no pervy host’ box on the rental form, so there can’t be secret cameras surveilling everything – this channels such weird relationships dramas as Knife in the Water and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or even the twisty couples thriller A Perfect Getaway.  That the prologue features extremely explicit gore and nudity is slightly misleading, since the bulk of the movie simmers and sizzles without requiring the cast to show anything even in sex or near-sex scenes.  The turn comes when Will does something odd and unforgivable, but tries to walk it back – then it’s more about fulfilling than defying expectations, with as much foreshadowing as shock in the unfolding of the plot.

Eventually, we turn back to the gore and chase element and a tangle of modern gothic backstory which hints at VC Andrews’ world.  Hasson, who was also in Morgan’s previous film Fixation, gives the most nuanced, complicated performance, but the other three bring what they need to for the storyline of shifting loyalties to work.

Here’s the FrightFest listing.