The cold open of Bone Lake succinctly tells you pretty much exactly what you’re going to get for the entire movie. A tense chase through the woods culminates in an extreme close-up of a naked man receiving an extremely personal injury. Then we cut to a couple driving in the car, where a different man is narrating the scene that just happened. When asked for her opinion, the woman he’s with eventually observes, “It seems gratuitous.”
The premise of the story is similar to Barbarian: our protagonists have somehow booked a weekend stay at an implausibly huge mansion on the edge of Bone Lake. (I didn’t quite catch their names; maybe if the movie had had a character say the names ten thousand and one times, they would’ve stuck). After they’ve settled in and made themselves at home, a second couple arrives and unlocks the door — they’ve also reserved the place for the same weekend.
The couples somewhat reluctantly agree to share the place. Since they’re both going to get refunded anyway, it’s a free stay in an impossibly nice mansion. And they can leave any time they want. What’s the worst that could happen?
It’s worth pointing out that the premise works better than it might seem from a brief synopsis. In the moment, you can see why people not aware that they’re in a horror movie might play along with this scenario. Each of the couples had been looking forward to the trip, there’s a sunk cost fallacy going on, and most prominently: social anxiety. Everybody seems nice enough, there are plenty of ways to back out, and nobody wants to be rude.
For that matter, the idea of a financially-stressed couple being able to afford to rent a place this huge might initially feel like something that the movie just expects you to accept and move on. But they give Sage and Diego dialogue explaining why they’re making the splurge. And by the end of the movie, of course, you understand why these couples can really afford to stay in such a nice place.
Similarly: the second couple Will and Cin are preternaturally good-looking and charming. But Sage and Diego are also preternaturally good-looking; they’re just presented in a way that Hollywood believes is an average level of attractiveness. And there’s a bit of dialogue addressing that, too, with Will coming up with a more tactful but horny way of saying that they’re 10s hanging out with 7s. (But still, nobody in the movie makes it explicit that Diego is the hottest person to a distracting degree, so I can’t tell if we were supposed to believe he’s an average guy?)
They even play into the double entendre of the title — this is very much pitched as a sexy horror movie — by having the guys acknowledge it and the girls roll their eyes at how juvenile it is.
Bone Lake is full of stuff like that — things that you accept because it’s a movie, but the filmmakers still insist on showing their work and letting you know they’re on top of things. It’s self-aware, but neither in the desperate to be in on the joke nor the overly-arch sense. It’s more like a voice popping in periodically to remind us that this is designed to be gratuitous. It’s supposed to be fun and sexy and violent, and you really shouldn’t take it that seriously.
It’s frequently funny, especially in the final act, but it’s not what I’d call a horror comedy, because it isn’t always juggling extremes in tone. It has relatable characters having realistic conversations about relationship problems, but it doesn’t turn into a drama because they’re never allowed to overshadow the plot. And it spends most of its first couple of acts getting the couples into increasingly awkward social situations, but they feel more like the early beats of a slasher movie: short bursts that make you cringe on the way to what you’re sure is going to be explosive violence later on.
I figured out everything that was going on pretty early in the proceedings. But I didn’t feel let down, nor did I feel overly clever for being smarter than the movie, because I’m not even sure that the “twists” were intended to be all that surprising. I got the sense that the filmmakers assumed that the audience was familiar enough with how these movies work that it was building suspense. We spend most of the movie just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Overall, I think Bone Lake works exactly as it was designed to work. It was all fun, appealing, and well-executed (although there was one fight scene set to an “ironic” song that I could’ve done without). Even if there wasn’t anything that felt shockingly original, it did feel like smart people respecting my intelligence and wanting me to have some fun with a horror movie. The ending was gruesome and satisfying, and I thought the final shots were outstanding. It’s exactly the kind of low-to-mid-budget, fun-but-not-stupid horror movie that’s perfect for October.