Bleecker Street’s Bone Lake hit theaters on Oct. 3, with all the horniness that title implies. As director Mercedes Bryce Morgan told Polygon, “It’s called Bone Lake ’cause it’s the place where people go to bone. We wanted a title that let people know how campy and fun and ridiculous the movie was going to be. I think if we named it something much more serious, people would be set up for the wrong movie.”
But while Bone Lake does lean into the promise of a fun time with its so-dumb-they’re-hysterical villains and a chainsaw incident that’s both hilarious and gory, it’s also inevitably a movie about relationships, and how miscommunication and a lack of trust can lead to their own brand of horrors.
The trust that main couple Diego (Marco Pigossi) and Sage (Maddie Hasson) have in their relationship is put to the ultimate test when another couple, Will (Alex Roe) and Cin (Andra Nechita), gatecrash a planned loved-up weekend vacation at Bone Lake. While Will and Cin seem perfectly normal at first, they reveal a predatory side, goading Sage and Diego to cheat on each other. There’s a catch: If they take the bait, Will and Cin will consider their relationship superior to Sage and Diego’s, and slaughter them as punishment. It’s a game with deadly consequences.
[Ed. note: Minor spoilers ahead about some ambiguity in Bone Lake.]
Will appeals to Sage’s desire for equality in a relationship. He knows Sage fakes her orgasms, and that Diego refuses to experiment sexually to please her, such as with sex toys. That leaves Sage vulnerable to an invitation that takes her pleasure into account. Meanwhile, Cin appeals to Diego’s lust, and learns that’s a fool’s game, so she tries a smarter tactic. Diego recently gave up his teaching job so he could try to write a novel. That’s strained his relationship with Sage, who’s now solely responsible for keeping them afloat financially. Cin tears at his masculinity by letting him know that Sage doesn’t believe in him as a man or a writer.
The camera lingers on Cin and Will’s propositions: the heated glances, the close-ups of lips and eyes. And then Morgan cuts away completely. We never get to see whether Diego or Sage accept Will and Cin’s indecent proposals, or turn them down.
As the movie ramps up and Will and Cin’s cat-and-mouse game comes to a head, Will taunts Diego, claiming he did have sex with Sage. But considering the numerous lies Will and Cin both share throughout Bone Lake, it’s clear they’re both unreliable narrators. And because Morgan cuts away, the audience will never know for sure.
Morgan says leaving the audience to put their trust in Sage and Diego’s bond was intentional. “I think that trust in relationships — and everything in life — is not something you can really see or nail down,” she said. “You either have to choose to trust that person or not.”
But Sage and Diego’s triumphs are hard-won, and Morgan felt it was important to convey the emotional and sexual contrasts between them and Will and Cin.
“Even though Will and Cin aren’t good people, I’d say they have their relationship shit figured out a lot more, because they communicate,” Morgan explained. “They’re playing by the same rules, whereas Sage and Diego are not. They don’t communicate, they don’t say what they need sexually.”
This lack of communication is strangling Sage and Diego’s sex life, and it’s what makes Will and Cin’s pursuit feel like such a threat. The two couples are so clearly contrasted, particularly in their sex scenes: Will and Cin are intense, passionate, and loud together. Each knows what the other wants. Morgan shoots their sex scenes either off-screen, often with Sage and Diego in bed overhearing them, while noticeably not having sex, or in darkness, heightening the air of mystery and danger around them. Sage and Diego’s sex scene is shot in daylight, and it feels clinical, with Sage contorting herself to fit what Diego needs in the bedroom, and not trusting that he’ll take it well if she communicates what she needs from him.
“Sex can be the most amazing thing in the world, or the most emotional thing in the world,” Morgan said.” Even though this is a sexy movie, one of the first sex scenes, we see where this couple is not connecting, and she’s faking it. We could see she’s really uncomfortable, and he’s not totally aware.”
She says one of the things she wanted to see in Bone Lake was an illustration of how couples should communicate with each other. “It sounds cliché, but communicating with each other [is crucial], because better communication leads to better sex and better relationships,” she said.
That said, she wanted to ensure that Sage and Diego’s relationship troubles don’t come from a place of malicious intent — just from ignorance about how to make a relationship work. “I just wanted to create it where you could understand both characters, where you go, ‘Maybe he’s not as aware as he should be. But he’s also wanting to please his partner, but he doesn’t know how.’”
It’s obvious that Sage and Diego’s dynamic needs to be fixed — but most struggling couples probably wouldn’t prefer to do that by having murderous gatecrashers interrupt a romantic weekend, and bring all their flaws to light. Then again, who needs couple therapy when you can fight seductive killers together instead?
Bone Lake is in theaters now.