FANTASTIC FEST: ‘Bone Lake’ Resurrects The Erotic Thriller

It seems improbable that a true-blue erotic thriller like Bone Lake could exist today. But Bone Lake isn’t content to portray adults in sexual relationships at the bare minimum. Bone Lake is a playful, twisty-turny take on relationships, aging, and, yes, physicality that gets its kicks playing on audience assumptions about said topics.

Diego (Marco Pigossi) and Sage (Maddie Hasson) are ready to unwind. Booking a stay in a semi-remote cabin by the titular double-entendre Bone Lake, they’re ready to escape the stresses of their day-to-day life, where Sage is the breadwinner for the two as Diego struggles to write his next novel. There’s a truth in their relationship, thanks to subtle performances from our leads and deliberate writing by screenwriter Joshua Friedlander. Diego and Sage radiate passive-aggression between each other, or so they seem to think. Marco Pigossi does an excellent job of communicating a fear of inadequacy that manifests in his plan to propose to Sage as a last-ditch effort to prove his value.

Bone Lake really kicks off upon discovering that the cabin is double-booked for the weekend. Taking a page right out of Barbarian, director Mercedes Bryce Morgan plays on the generation gap between Diego, Sage, and the younger couple Will (Alex Roe) and Cin (Andra Nechita). The younger couple is carefree, very sexually active, and affectionate in public whenever they get the chance. Alex Roe and Andra Nechita are the perfect actors to play these roles. They’re obnoxious yet enticing. There may be a sinister undercurrent to their actions, but it could also just be a generational difference in their brash communication and the stuffier, tongue-holding politeness of Diego and Sage.

Bone Lake adds a little spice, courtesy of a pervasive sensuality running through Mercedes Bryce Morgan’s direction and Alex Roe and Andra Nechita’s increasingly seductive performances. The younger couple represents a real threat to the older protagonists. Their desires are activated, causing them to look inward at their own relationship issues.

Eventually, the time comes for Bone Lake to lean into the thriller part of the erotic thriller moniker. Stripped down to the barest of descriptors, Bone Lake puts the couples in an ideological and physical struggle against each other that’s a whole lot of fun. Cinematographer Nick Matthews puts in the groundwork to define the cabin’s architecture enough that it becomes a multi-layered battlefield of cunning between the two couples.

Bone Lake wants us to ask questions about our own relationships and, within those relationships, the validity of our methods of communication and our relationships to physical intimacy. Are the carefree, sexually hyperactive ways of the young couple, with the salacious secrets hidden underneath, the truest reflection of love? Or are the lived in struggles of a relationship well into their time together what love really looks like? Perhaps it’s both, or neither. Bone Lake keeps adding new wrinkles to these questions by piling on trashy genre thrills and ridiculous swerves in the narrative.

By the time Mercedes Bryce Morgan takes us out on an ending note that feels like a sicko version of The Graduate, those questions still linger. Bone Lake resurrects the erotic thriller by drawing a direct line to modern horror films meant to play on audience assumptions, namely Barbarian and Speak No Evil. What makes Bone Lake stand on its own in a chaste cinematic climate is a frank discussion of relationships. It discovers insights along the way that prove the erotic thriller is a valid and necessary method of genre storytelling.

Bone Lake premiered as part of Fantastic Fest 2024.