Bone Tomahawk

Rough, raw, brutal and uncompromising and yet based mainly on the characters. And what will disappoint you even more is the unstyled and rushed ending, which lacks a proper finale and which turns away from those characters. The ending is simply too brief and quick considering how slow was in the first three quarters. (18.12.2015)

I think that, when it comes to film quality, there has never been a better horror movie with aboriginal cannibals. A week ago I complained that in Roth's Green Inferno hardly anything happens for half of the film. Here, the proportion between “introduction” and “action” is even more sober, but it doesn’t matter at all when you can see the difference in talent between Roth and the first-time director S. Craig Zahler. Ninety minutes are dedicated to introducing characters stubbornly determined to rescue the abducted inhabitants of a village. That’s enough time to sincerely start rooting for them, which also helped by the superb performances. The extremely brutal final half-hour then feels like a sucker punch, because the tribe of cannibals don’t fool around. It is very clear for everyone that these nice characters have walked into a place where they should have never been at all. I never imagined that the horror genre could blend so smoothly with the western. But Bone Tomahawk is both a really good western and really good horror. Very close to perfection. (25.10.2015)

It’s nice to come across a genre film that takes its time, lets the shots fade out and, instead of quickly satisfying viewers, slowly builds the atmosphere and the depiction of the characters. Thanks also to the patient and precise work with the mise-en-scène and the old-school linear narrative, it’s easy in the first hour to fall under the impression that you’re watching a classic western. In fact, Bone Tomahawk is a post-classic western combined with a cannibal horror movie (at the same time, the second half of the film can be seen as a subverted variation on hixploitation). Conducting themselves with the straightforwardness of cowboys, the men, one of whom is a cripple and the other a purblind widower, are branded as idiots by the self-sufficient female protagonist, while the ignorant attitude towards native culture has bloody consequences, and the theory of the frontier (between wilderness and civilisation) is not only taken to hellish extremes, but can also be related to the genre bipolarity of the film, which quite thought-provokingly explores the overlaps of horror movies and westerns (fear of strangers, the arrogance of the powerful white man). Though the ending doesn’t provide the satisfaction that I would have expected based on the care taken in the preceding two hours, Bone Tomahawk is still, together with The Hateful Eight, the best western updated for the troubled times in which we live, and by drawing from the exploitation tradition, it is far wittier and honest than The Revenant. (22.10.2017)

The genre of horror western is definitely a term that deserves further study from the point of view of filmmaking. In this one, the director and screenwriter S. Craig Zahler didn’t overthink things and came up with the simplest story there might be. He placed a tribe of cannibalistic Indians into the Wild West – nobody has ever heard of them at all – and he also put together a rescue party that will try to rescue a chick from the tennets of these disgusting savages. End of story. But what’s important is what’s happening in the film. For instance, in the first half of the film, barely anything happens. Only the atmosphere keeps slowly but intensely building up, presenting a version of the Wild West involving a wild tribe that emits inhumane shrieks like giant sperm whales in mating season. But once our rescue party meets the tribe in a close encounter, that’s when the real suspense starts, and every now and then you get a proper piece of gore, which I am not going to discuss here any further so that I wouldn’t spoil the fun for you. That’s actually the only reason why the film is worth seeing. Well that and also there’s Kurt Russell, who fits into the charcter of the sheriff perfectly. But what role doesn’t he fit into perfectly… (30.01.2017)

Dialogue as if from a contemporary Manhattan conversational movie, theatrical performances, an atmosphere that is anything but western, amateurish cinematographic work with space and, in the end, a hole in the logic that makes it look like the filmmakers are mocking their audience. Bone Tomahawk reminded me of some festival bizarreness from the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival awarded the Ecumenical Jury prize. But I watched it to the end, because to see such cruel and brutal scenes in a western with a cast of A-listers is even rarer than the painfully bad direction. (30.11.2016)