Bone Tomahawk: The Wild Frontier

I’m always a little skeptical about period pieces. Scary movies are already sort of a difficult proposition because they rely on more suspension of disbelief than drama or comedy - people like to be scared, but not too scared, and one way some people modulate their experience is by using improbabilities or inconsistencies in the film as sort of a safety valve. Some folks need to be reminded it’s just a movie, and one way to do that is to focus on its artificiality. And so anytime you set your film in another time, with attendant changes in dialogue and dress and setting, you’re adding artificiality - you’re making it easier for the audience to distance itself, and if you do it badly, it’s just going to look corny and stupid.

Fortunately, Bone Tomahawk isn’t corny or stupid. It’s a Western, set on a merciless frontier, that also serves as an exercise in slow dread.

The film opens cold, on a man having his throat cut by one of two road agents. They’re doing their murderous business and at the same time having a conversation that wouldn’t be much out of place in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. The sound of horses causes them to flee, and they take a wrong turn into someplace they shouldn’t be. Someplace holy, adorned with skulls, and one of them meets an end as quick and nasty as the people to whom they’d just been attending. The other flees.

Cut to “Eleven Days Later” and the small frontier town of Bright Hope. We’re introduced in turn to some of the people in town - Arthur O’Dwyer is a cowboy laid up with a broken leg, his wife Samantha is a nurse. Franklin Hunt is the town sheriff, old-timer Chicory is his “backup deputy,” and John Brooder is a man apparently of some means (and arrogance). Bright Hope is a small, but established frontier settlement, and though we don’t get a sense of how populous it is, the people we’re introduced to feel like actual people. In the lead-up to what comes next, the film does a good job of showing instead of telling - we get lots of little details about these people and the town, and not every detail means something to the plot, but they all tell us more about the world, giving it a little more depth, like life was going on here before the movie began.

And so Chicory, in his capacity as backup deputy, comes to Sheriff Hunt with a report: He was out on a walk, and noticed a suspicious fellow burying some suitcases in the ground out on the far edge of town, before coming into town and stopping for a drink at the local watering hole. So the sheriff and his backup deputy take a walk down to the bar to have a polite conversation with the stranger - a conversation that ends with the stranger getting shot in the leg. Sheriff Hunt isn’t cruel, but he doesn’t fuck around. And since the town doctor is drunk (yet again), Samantha is called to the jail to extract the bullet and treat the wound. It’s all calm, and measured. John Brooder escorts Samantha to the jail, and once she’s done with the operation and once the stranger’s fever has abated, non-backup deputy Nick will escort her home. Hunt and Chicory are called away regarding a colt missing from the town stable. When they get there, they find all the horses gone, and the stable boy eviscerated.

And when they get back to the jail, everyone is gone. The deputy, the stranger, and Samantha. There are signs of a struggle. Arrows buried in the wall. Their first assumption is Indians, and so Hunt begins to put together a posse and calls for “The Professor” - a native who lives in town - to identify the tribe that took them. It’s weird, though - usually arrows have heads made from sharpened flint.

These are tipped with sharpened bone.

As it transpires, the culprits aren’t any recognized tribe. As The Professor puts it, you can’t be a tribe when you have no language. These are feral, cave-dwelling people - “troglodytes” who eat human flesh, and they live four days’ ride from Bright Hope, in what is largely terra incognita. And so, Sheriff Hunt, John Brooder, Chicory, and Arthur O’Dwyer, who would not be dissuaded, ride out for the Valley of the Starving Men to rescue their people on what The Professor tells them is a suicide mission.

Now, before I go on, one of the really tricky bits of most Western narratives is the way they, at their heart, are always going to be stories about white colonists subjugating and massacring their way westward. It wasn’t a great time to be a woman or anything other than white, and setting up the monsters of the piece as “savages” is more likely than not going to be kind of a problem. The film does try to get ahead of this with a Native American character who frames the antagonists as being of no tribe, as of being so debased as to not even be Native American, but having this designation made by a Native American who lives among whites and dresses as they do has its own problems.

Like, it’s very difficult to tell this kind of story in this day and age without the ghost of every horrible thing that went into the white colonization of North America looming over it. The film doesn’t lean into Western clichés on this front, thank goodness, but neither does it really engage with or subvert them either. The massacres that came with westward expansion are acknowledged matter-of-factly. They are neither unambiguously condemned nor justified as right, just a fact of recent history, which is probably better than leaning into a more traditional “red savages” narrative, but...when it’s a Western, and there are savages, however un-Native American they’re framed as being, it’s still there, and it didn’t feel right to me to write about this film without at least acknowledging it. Maybe “not actively offensive” is the best we can hope for here.

But, all that said, this isn’t a thoughtless or careless film, or one that goes for the obvious. It’s a quiet film - some somber strings punctuate important moments, but otherwise it’s just the sounds of the prairie, the badlands, the frontier town where the pianist in the local bar has a tidy little pricing scam running, so although we get the obligatory saloon, we don’t get the honky-tonk piano we’ve come to expect. The dialogue is definitely archaic, but believably so, avoiding a lot of the Yosemite Sam-style clichés that would be easy to fall back on. The characters aren’t overstated or cartoonish - they are definite types, yes, the sheriff is very much a Western sheriff, and Chicory has a bit of Gabby Hayes in him, but at every step we’re allowed to see more of them than just those obvious references, and so they never seems like cartoons. There’s also a real vein of wry, understated humor running through the film that helps humanize the protagonists, and because it’s not broad or overplayed, it throws the horror into contrast. In the final act, when things get really dire, it even adds a certain amount of pathos.

And indeed, things do get dire. A lot of the horror comes from the way the film posits the frontier itself as predatory. The elements, animals, humans, humans existing at a level barely above animal, the dangers inherent in even the slightest injury in a time when medicine was primitive and infection more likely than not, resources and help being spread thin and far away - all of these things conspire against our protagonists on their journey. It reminds me a little of The Descent in this respect - they’re going into unknown territory without any backup, in conditions where survival is perilous, where anything going wrong is going to have big costs, and of course things start going wrong. The quietness of the film extends to the horror as well - it’s not telegraphed or overdone, just as much a fact of the environment as anything else. Violence is sudden and sharp, and happens off-screen as often as not. It’s not gratuitously gory, so when it does get gory, there’s real impact. The overall tone throughout is one of restraint, punctuated with awful things that happen without warning.

It’s a measured, deliberate exercise in stripping away hope, in making things harder and harder for the protagonists, before they even get where they’re going, and where they’re going is horrible, a place of atavism and butchery, and it’s scary because we have reason to care about these people, and then when we finally see what they’re up against - covered in powdered bone, making an unnatural sound somewhere between a keen and a roar - and what they do to their captives, it’s nightmarish. The frontier is a dangerous place, with depths you explore at your peril.

IMDB entry
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