If you’ve been craving a horror-slasher film that’s a lot of dumb fun and will make you wince all at the same time, there’s a good chance Bone Lake is on your radar. This new horror movie from director Mercedes Bryce Morgan arrived in theaters on Oct. 3 with an absurd premise and the suggestive title to match.
[Ed. note: Spoilers follow for the ending of Bone Lake.]
With a name like Bone Lake and an opening sequence that has people running butt naked throughout the woods and, inevitably, getting shot with a crossbow in the tush and testicles, you’d be right in thinking there’s going to be plenty of levity throughout. Even the film’s ending, which features the main couple looking worse for wear, but giggling hysterically together, has a sense of dark humor to it.
You would need to find something to laugh about, too, if you experienced what Diego (Marco Pigossi) and Sage (Maddie Hasson) go through in Bone Lake. A couple riddled with relationship problems from the get-go (lack of communication, unsatisfying sex, an unfair burden of financial responsibility, you name it), their relationship is put to the test when another duo, Will (Alex Roe) and Cin (Andra Nachita), gatecrash their romantic weekend away.
What initially appears to be a clash of contrasts between the two couples — Sage and Diego are awkward and working-class, whereas Cin and Will have a rich, lavish lifestyle and seem to be making out on every surface possible — takes a dark turn as the weekend goes on. Cin and Will play on Sage and Diego’s insecurities in their relationship. They spread lies and gossip about the other couple, claiming to know about an affair and other internal drama.
All of these insecurities explode in the most monumental way possible when Sage and Diego discover that Cin and Will aren’t just here at Bone Lake by mistake: they own it and have been luring couples to the estate in order to get them to cheat on their partners. Why? Because Will and Cin are actually brother and sister. After their incestuous affair was discovered by their parents and they were forcibly separated, they decided to punish everyone else (including their parents). If the world turned against them simply for loving who they want, then they’ll turn against the world. Will and Cin’s goal is to hold up a mirror to all the couples they ultimately end up killing, in an attempt to prove that their love is just as valid (or invalid) as the love of these other couples they try to break up.
However, what Will and Cin don’t take into account is that Sage and Diego, despite their lack of communication with one another, do care for and love each other. It just took having a murderous couple try to break them up and kill them to realize it. If that sounds serious, it isn’t played that way. Bone Lake’s tone is more camp than genuine horror.
The movie ends with Sage and Diego teaming up to escape Will and Cin’s murderous intentions. What’s interesting is that while, at the beginning of the film you sense a deep abyss in the relationship between Sage and Diego in comparison to Will and Cin, by the end, Bone Lake flips it on its head. Will and Cin split up to hunt Sage and Diego, but Sage and Diego are communicating better now. They team up to butcher Will with a chainsaw. They then turn on Cin, who meets her grisly end at the bottom of Bone Lake’s lake — but not before Diego takes back the wedding ring meant for Sage that Will had stolen and gifted to Cin.
In the aftermath of their double murder, covered in blood and viscera, Sage and Diego sit together on the end of a boat. Ironically, this is the closest they’ve been since the beginning of the film, now that all their relationship troubles have been laid out for both of them to see, and all they have left are their battered and bruised bodies. As if to confirm their new closeness and intimate understanding of one another, Diego reaches over to slip the wedding ring on Sage’s finger and, when she turns to examine it in the light, the two begin to laugh.
It’s not hard to see why: When Will proposed to Cin, it was a picturesque, romantic moment. When Diego does the same for Sage, they’ve just escaped from a brutal nightmare. And yet, Diego’s proposal to Sage is not grounded in lies, just the realization that they’ve come out of the worst ordeal of their lives and, after all that, they still want to spend the rest of their life together.
Though, as director Mercedes Bryce Morgan tells Polygon, the ending doesn’t necessarily mean a happy ever after for Diego and Sage.
“If you go through that situation with someone where you go through a murderous bloodbath, how do you come out of that? What do you do as a person? And so I wanted to capture all of the moments there together where it’s this euphoria of ‘thank goodness’ and ‘are we getting what we’ve always wanted, but what the fuck just happened? What the fuck do we do now?’ And just that set in of reality of ‘what does that mean for us now?’”
