Bone Lake is a bit of a rug pull of a movie. Mercedes Bryce-Morgan talks about the way that the movie shuns some of the prudishness of Gen Z and political correctness of the post-#MeToo era. Her recent work from Come Fuck My Robot (2020) and Spoonful of Sugar (2022) play with erotic thriller genre tropes. Bone Lake’s marketing positioned it as a sexy twist on the Evil Pool movie from last year (Night Swim) which seemed weirdly similar in concept and plot to the less evil, more sexy story Lake House Ten from 2022, but if you were expecting the Evilish Sexy Lake vibes from that world of horny web junk, then you are going to be severely disappointed.
(Spoilers Ahead.) Bone Lake reads like the slowest, most uncoordinated porn script you’ve ever read for the first twenty five minutes. The premise, that two sexually mismatched couples both find themselves renting the same vacation rental for the weekend and then hijinks ensue is flawless, and yet, watching four actors mirthlessly pantomime a porn trope so worn that you could compose it in your sleep, and–worse–drag it out by seeming confused by the reasons for such a Strange Coincidence when the porn trope itself usually takes all of thirty seconds is painful. The casting and names read like a lazy writer’s first draft that no one bothered to give a second pass to. The sketchy girl’s name is “Cin” (SIN GET IT) and the annoying, clueless boyfriend with a sensitive male ego who is about to quit his job to write his novel looks like a bargain bin Diego Luna and his NAME IS DIEGO. Alex Roe is actually doing a pretty good job so I can’t say anything to keep the momentum on this flame fest going, except that his performance feels very self-consciously like a copypasta of the Max character played by Robbie Amell in Netflix’s sexy slasher flick from 2017, The Babysitter. Alex Roe, by the by, is probably riding off of some good will from his performance in another 2017 movie starring Timothy Chalamet called Hot Summer Nights, which I highly recommend instead of this movie.
Once the film dispenses with clumsily rationalizing its own premise, it picks up a little. The couples play games. It’s revealed that the beta male who can’t sexually please his long-time girlfriend is going to haplessly propose in two days’ time, which gives us a little bit of a structure to anticipate the spooky sexy times, but the film sort of fumbles the pacing and wastes multiple nights with advancement of the plot or characters.
I whispered to Friend at the first night scene that the spooky sexy couple were probably Sexy Ghosts, phantasma that haunt the house and lake and probably are there to teach the couple a lesson or prey on them or whatever, and the cliche scene where they open up the rental owners’ locked doors really lends a lot of credence to that theory–less with the sex dungeon and more with the Oujia board seance room (which in retrospect feels like a big red herring). By the second day and Cin’s clumsy and sub-literate seduction of Diego (“I lost my glasses could you pick out a corset and some panties for me to wear from my luggage?”), it becomes clear that the couple are more like relationship succubi? Who prey on the insecurities of couples in order sustain themselves, but the final reveal of it just being two regular people kind of Willy Wonkaing couples is a lot less interesting. There is this sort of twist which holds so much promise at the halfway point and turn to the movie, where we glimpse a flashback in which Cin and Will clearly stage their own arrival and the audience understands that they’re the owners even though Sage and Diego don’t know it, but the reward for that dramatic irony is pretty thin, as is the twist to the twist when Sage and Diego start to feign insecurities in order to rescue themselves.
There are a lot of ways in which Bryce-Morgan’s Bone Lake feels like a cheap Lafufu knock off of erotic thrillers made a decade earlier and less like an edgy, iconoclastic sex-positive thriller of the 2020s. Weirdly, two different erotic thrillers from 2015 demonstrate those principles pretty well: Knock Knock starring Keanu Reeves, Ana de Armas and Eli Roth’s wife Lorenzo Izza, takes the porn premise of two rando hot girls stumbling on your house on a cold, rainy night and tripping onto your dick before twisting the plot into a home invasion movie. Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak found ways to make incest both a startling plot twist and hot. Bone Lake tries to make incest into a plot point toward the end of the movie but it feels very much stapled onto the script. No one is even really that grossed out by it, because the couple has such good chemistry compared to Sage and Diego. Their unnatural relationship feels more like a hard won relationship goal than a taboo source of trauma and pain.
The aesthetics of Crimson Peak as gothic horror give it the mold for situating its creepy horny energy in a way that generic lake and generic house really don’t have any established tropes, which makes all the spooky stuff feel unwieldy and out of place. And really, that’s fine! If they had borrowed from porn tropes instead, done a Cabin in the Woods with pheromones to the lake setting, it could’ve worked pretty well! There are a lot of absurdist tropes from porn and literotica, even tropes from LAKE literotica specifically that they could’ve borrowed that would’ve made the incest more interesting and essential to the plot and could’ve made the horror elements more spooky. Bestie points to the amnesia of Blink Twice as a good example of porn trope adapted to thriller successfully, and I’ll add to that Ti West’s 2022 slasher X, which was entirely predicated upon the fusion of both 1980s porn and horror tropes.
Bone Lake is doing both sexy and spooky wrong but really you’re to blame for going to see it and not taking the time to ask yourself some essential questions about your threshold for quality, because as long as you’ll see anything that hints at maybe being a little risque for the sake of salaciousness, the more you’re gonna get catfished by lazy writing from Shutter films.
