In short: Little Bone Lodge (2023)

Mama (Joely Richardson) lives with Pa (Roger Ajogbe) and daughter Maisy (Sadie Soverall) in a farmhouse somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Scotland. Mama is clearly the dominant member of the family – Pa is ill, doesn’t talk, barely moves, and spends most of the film slumped in a wheelchair, while Maisy seems to have been so well protected from the dangers of the world, her naivety borders on mental illness.

A birthday dinner for Pa is rudely interrupted during a dark and very stormy night (sorry) by a pair of brothers, Jack (Neil Linpow, who also wrote the script) and Matty (Harry Cadby). Jack is wounded, supposedly in an accident, but thanks to Matty being a terrible liar, and not terribly clever in other ways as well, it is pretty clear early on that there’s something rather more wrong going on with the brothers than a simple case of accident. But then, it is pretty clear to the audience that something’s not quite right about the resident family, as well. Their respective wrongnesses will clash, and the usual dark secrets will be revealed.

None of those secrets should come as much of a surprise to anyone even mildly versed in the ways of thriller and horror movies. One can only have so many different kinds of messed up family businesses in a movie, and Matthias Hoene’s film does make life rather more difficult for itself here by trying to keep its messed up things somewhat classy and subtle, further limiting the possibility for surprises of the nasty kind.

This doesn’t mean Little Bone Lodge is squeamish or unwilling to go to somewhat unpleasant places like the really disturbed and unironic British Lifetime thriller of our imagination – it’s just not interested in wallowing there, even when it goes for the grimmest ending possible. Which is at once the right and proper decision and a bit disappointing, for the specific psychological messes the film has decided to use for its characters could work very well in a movie more invested in the nasty surface.

The film is still a rather fine example of its form, using elements of the home invasion thriller for good, building quite a bit of tension and excitement out of its nicely worn tropes. Well, I didn’t exactly ask for yet another version of the toxically evil mother figure, but Joely Richardson makes her particular variation on the theme so steelily impressive and seductively convincing in her mad logic, I’m not exactly going to complain here, either. The ensemble in general is very good at filling the characters with so much life, even the script’s more implausible moments feel completely convincing.