Review of 'Buse Lake': duel holiday couples in a very borrowed horror movie

Mercedes Bryce Morgan's horror movie “Bone Lake” announces itself with a surprisingly shameless starter and closes with a bloody blood festival, the song “Sex and Violence” by the United Kingdom's punk team, electing the thesis of the film for us. It is the intertwined of sex and violence, you see. But what develops between these mischievous and viscera bathes is less a traditional horror movie and more than one psychosexual thriller, such as “fun games” played between two young attractive couples, with a configuration provided by “Barbarian”.

In Joshua Friedlander's script, a double reserve of an isolated rental mansion becomes a double appointment when Will (Alex Roe) and Cin (Andra Nechita) run into the intimate empty of wise (Maddie Hasson) and Diego (Marco Possi). Couples decide to make the most of it and stay, promising the rock paper stalls for the house if something becomes “strange.”

And it gets weird that you do it. While Diego and Sage seemed perfectly happy at the arrival, the sexy and uninhibited will has a way of getting their insecurities, finding cracks to their relationship and comadre on their way.

Like any weekend horror movie (for example, “Speak No Evil”), the couple's female half catches a bad vibrates that their male partner rules out, due to their personal interest in wanting to stay. For Diego, it is the promise that Cin will share her writing with its favorite author, for whom she claims to work. They overlook the red flags, unleash their opportunities to leave and decide to enter with this unbridled couple, drink, play, break into secret rooms and dodge the sexual proposals of each of them.

Morgan and its photography director Nick Matthews make the location fun to see, with a palette of saturated colors and intelligent movements of the camera. However, there are scenes in which the film is frustratingly dark and subgrammed, even if it could be justified by the power that comes out during a storm.

While there is a certain enthusiasm and style in the central section, where Will and Cin attract their prey and toy with them, the Grand Guignol Climax has no rhythm or suspense; It is simply a blow of the audience with butcher shop, too late.

Other forceful instruments? Roe and Nechita, who do not perform their roles with any subtlety. Roe's willingly emerges as a dangerous hymbo; The CIN of Nechita is an exaggerated minx in his seduction of Diego and Sage. While Hassson's wise is an independent plausibly strident journalist, you wonder if he has a lot of experience with female friendship, because Cin's manipulation is very obvious. However, the novelist obsessed with Possi is perfectly released in his oblivion.

There is a nucleus of something fascinating in the “Bone Lake” center, a merger of sex and violence in gestures that are relatives of the true stories of crimes. But there is not enough motivation baked in the great turn of the third act, and the actions are simply not strong enough to suggest nothing deeper.

“Bone Lake” offers an attractive surface, but ultimately is too shallow to immerse it.

Katie Walsh is a film critique of the Tribune news service.