Films > Film Reviews

Bone Tomahawk

01/03/16

The directorial debut from S. Craig Zahler begins with a throat slitting and ends with something much worse. It's John Ford's The Searchers á la Wes Craven; cowboys and Indians with death scenes worthy of Cannibal Holocaust.

As with the host of recent westerns - Slow West, The Hateful Eight, the Coen's remake of True Grit, (The Revenant?) - Bone Tomahawk's story is fuelled by revenge. Two drifters stumble upon the sacred burial site of an inbred native American tribe known only as 'troglodytes'; one is killed, the other escapes to the town of Bright Hope, where Kurt Russell's sheriff arrests him for theft. While Mrs O' Dwyer, wife to Patrick Wilson's crippled foreman, tends to the criminal’s wounds they are captured in a troglodyte raid. The remaining men set out accompanied by a white-suited Matthew Fox to bring the captives back.

The film's a slow burner: it could have started forty minutes in, but it’s never eager to finish. Much of the exposition could have been wrapped up in half the time, but it feels careful, detailed; the brutality is saved for the end, and when it comes it’s all the more frightening. Zahler introduces horror into an over-mined genre, bringing to it a different kind of tension to the one we are so used to seeing. No show-downs here, no bareback horse chases: the cannibal troglodytes are the ultimate fascination, bestial hulks with animal tusks sewn into their cheeks and bone whistles attached to their jugulars that produce echoing animal howls. Move over The Hills Have Eyes.

Unsurprisingly Russell’s character is much more likeable than his turn in The Hateful Eight; in fact, the searchers remain unusually well-mannered for such a troubling situation. Wilson is a little out of place, but Fox is a perfect fit and Lili Simmons is brilliant as the level-headed doctor with an intimate knowledge of opium dosage. As the film opens with Sid Haig playing one of the drifters (star of Rob Zombie’s gore-shockers House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects) the tone is set; there are shades of black comedy worthy of any exploitation horror, yet a reverence for the western genre keeps Bone Tomahawk from straying too far from the beloved spaghetti tradition.

7.5/10