Bone Tomahawk (2015)

The old West. A pair of drifters and murderers (David Arquette and good old Sid Haig) accidentally desecrate the burial ground belonging to a group of cannibalistic troglodytes. Sid Haig gets himself murdered right quick, but Arquette’s character manages to escape to a nearby town where he raises the interest of local Sheriff Franklin Hunt (Kurt Russell) enough to get himself shot in the leg.

Hunt calls in Samantha O’Dwyer (Lili Simmons), the unofficial yet highly competent actual town doctor without a degree - not to be confused with the alcoholic official town doctor we never get to see. The sheriff leaves her to tend to the prisoner under the care of his deputy, and calls it a night. The next morning, he finds a stable boy dead, and Lili, the deputy, the drifter and a bunch of horses gone. The murderers and abductors were of course the troglodytes the drifter accidentally led into town; at first, the Sheriff suggests it must have been an Indian attack, but as a quickly called in Native American diagnoses in a scene that feels a lot like the film holding up a placard with “See, we’re not racist against Native Americans” written on it, these weren’t actual Indians but members of a tribe of a degenerate and cannibalistic monster people dwelling in caves, though they might look like Indians to the unenlightened white people. See, it’s totally okay the film’s not going to give these guys even a single human trait, because the Indian said it’s alright.

Anyway, the Sheriff, his elderly reserve deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins), so racist even the Old West characters around him don’t approve John Brooder (Matthew Fox), and Lili’s husband Arthur (Patrick Wilson), who is suffering from a pretty debilitating leg wound since falling from a roof trying to be manly, are all the posse this town gets together to follow the troglodytes to their lair to save the abducted. Things won’t exactly go to plan.

So, did anyone ever really miss the cannibal movie? 2015 finally brought us the return of films about inhuman brown people eating white people nobody asked for, though at least without the real animal violence, because that really wouldn’t cut it today. I very much hope one day one of them will get around to perhaps do at least as much as Cannibal Holocaust did when examining its own assumptions – or, you know, just replace their cannibals with actual monsters and be done with it.

S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk isn’t that film; it is, in fact, not interested in facing the problem at the core of this particular sub-genre head on at all, therefore we get the scene described above, which really seems like an attempt at creating an easy out to me. On the other hand, the scene also suggests the film isn’t really interested in this sort of discussion of race at all and really rather sees its cannibals as representations of the dark heart of humanity, dehumanizing violence and so on and so forth. That’s of course problematic in contemporary parlance, but I’m generally trying to take on films on their own terms, and so am willing to appreciate the film is actually quite clear about its terms early on, giving me the opportunity to take them or leave them. Given how adept the film is at what it actually wants to do, I took them.

Once and if you do, you might just be surprised by the first one and a half hours of film you actually get, because while the troglodytes are introduced early on, for the longest time the film belongs to the calm and unhurried kind of modern western, with dialogue that at first seems to be a bit too indebted to Quentin Tarantino but then turns out to carry a different kind of emphasis and emotional weight that seems specific to Zahler (at least when you’ve read some of the man’s novels which I can highly recommend), and some spectacularly moody landscape shots that stand in strong contrast to the somewhat bland looking scenes taking place in town. There’s very little – though just enough – plot in these first two thirds of the film. Instead, Zahler puts all his considerable talent into creating a sense of a place and its dislocating brutality yet also into making the characters feel deeply human and complicated, even Fox’s vile racist whom most films would turn into an easy target for their audience’s hatred or give a too easy shot at redemption. There’s an honesty to the characterisation that feels special and personal, rooted in certain genre conventions but given space to breathe and live by dialogue that only seems self-indulgent on first contact, and based on a bunch of excellent acting performances.

This does of course make things emotionally harder to stomach when the film finally gets its cannibal movie on; I at least had grown rather fond of the characters and didn’t really want to see them getting ripped to pieces in horrible ways. So in that regard, the film too is quite the success, with one or two scenes that leave you squirming not just because they are unpleasant to watch but because they actually mean something.


Combine that with how uncomfortable I still am with the whole not-really-native-American cannibals, and you have, well, a film I find effective, moving, and meaningful yet also find myself struggling with loving unreservedly not because it’s a bad movie – it is indeed a very fine one – but because I wish it were different in a single aspect I found difficult to overlook in a film made today (well, or 2015).