Bone Lake (2025)
Directed by Mercedes Bryce Morgan
Screenplay by Joshua Friedlander
Starring Maddie Hasson, Alex Roe, Marco Pigossi, & Andra Nechita.

Horror / Thriller

★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SOME SPOILERS!
Turn back, lest ye be spoilt.

Even when horror’s not trying to be erotic, there’s often eroticism mingled with the violence, particularly in sub-genres like slasher horror, which Mercedes Bryce Morgan plays on in Bone Lake. Morgan’s film, penned by Joshua Friedlander, follows Sage (Maddie Hasson) and her partner Diego (Marco Pigossi) on a nice romantic getaway to a remote, fancy Airbnb, but their lovely vacation is interrupted by the arrival of Will (Alex Roe) and Cin (Andra Nechita), a couple who’ve also apparently booked the place. The couples decide to spend time at the luxurious house together, and nearly immediately the romantic trip gets weird. Will and Cin seem very free about their sexuality; not quite the case with Diego and Sage. Psychosexual games begin and get more devious until the couples discover hidden rooms in the house that reveal something far more sinister happening on the property.

There’s always room for eroticism and sexuality in horror, most certainly when treated properly, and while there are moments in Bone Lake that verge on camp—not the good kind—the film is an unsettling horror story that deals with the way many relationships appear lovely on the outside while they’re rotting from within. Sage and Diego are put to a test that challenges their dedication to one another, in and out of bed. Bone Lake doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it does deal seriously with relationship issues through a mix of horror, sex, and psychological head games.
One thing Bone Lake does expertly is show how in many relationships men are oblivious to the work women put into the man and the relationship itself. The following quote from Virginia Woolf, mostly taken from her book A Room of One’s Own, is a compelling addition to the film: “There is a kind of loneliness that lodges itself in the psyche and never fully leaves. Most anguishing not in solitude but in companionship and amid the crowd . . . I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject, however trivial or however vast. I hope that you will possess yourselves of money, enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world.” The interesting part of this mashup quote being included is that we see Sage is listening to a podcast when she hears this, and the “hesitating at no subject” line feels like inspiration for her telling Diego that he needs to swing for the fences creatively rather than worry about how people will react to his writing. We consistently see Sage trying to do what she feels will help Diego, even if it means foregoing her own pleasure, whether agreeing to financially support them while he takes a crack at being a novelist, or pretending to orgasm so he can feel like he’s satisfied her. Of course there are cracks in Sage’s efforts because she clearly resents Diego. At one point he walks in on her pleasing herself with a shower head, then she refuses his offer to join, probably because she knows he won’t get her off anyway. Relationship issues allow terror to seep into their lives; if their relationship were stronger, they might not be terrorised to such a dangerous extent, and if they were secure in their sexuality as a couple they might not be so vulnerable to the horrors that present themselves on their would-be romantic vacation.
Sometimes it takes something bad, or even tragic, to happen before people realise what’s most important to them, and such is the case for Sage and Diego. In the midst of a horrifying, violent situation, Diego and Sage finally open up truthfully about the issues, mainly sexual ones, they’ve been experiencing. The couple’s fractured communication repairs itself through sheer force of the trauma they go through together. At the same time, Diego and Sage’s issues are a great example of how normal relationship problems, like finances, can come to be expressed through sexuality. Sage’s resentment of Diego’s novel-writing aspirations and the financial ramifications on her bleeds through beyond language, as they’ve clearly dealt with sexual difficulties for a while. Sage once cheated on Diego, which couldn’t have helped his confidence in the bedroom, either. In the film, sometimes horror and sex are not separate, nor are they mashed together lazily, they’re often intertwined, from psychological terrors of sexuality in a relationship to much more physical terrors.

Bone Lake is not just a horror movie full of eroticism, it’s a movie about how various terrors in a relationship can wreak sexual havoc on bodies and psychological havoc on minds. The opening scene includes a hilariously gratuitous image of sexual violence when a naked man fleeing someone hunting him and a naked woman gets an arrow through his balls, then moments later, the naked woman is impaled on a fallen tree, a branch going through her chest, close enough to her heart for the purposes of this reading; the heart and the libido are both attacked. It’s easy to look at Bone Lake and only focus on the sexuality. When you look harder—or deeper, baby!—Bone Lake is a disturbed psychosexual thriller that works well on a metaphorical level: most people in strong, committed, honest relationships are not plagued by the same horrors and terrors as those in less solid relationships, and when there are wide, glaring cracks in a relationship this leaves people vulnerable to psychological manipulation. The ending of Morgan’s film makes clear that even the worst experiences can either bring people together, or it can tear them apart, both figuratively and quite literally.