It’s actually possible to be farsighted while looking through the lens of a movie camera…

Bone Lake is actually more of a flaccid pond because while this looks like a sleek sexy horror thriller from a distance, up close it’s a disjointed commentary on true love and the power dynamics between men and women that’s wrapped up in under lit locations, and way too much gore.

When two young couples are mistakenly double-booked into the same vacation rental their romantic weekend becomes a twisted maze of sex, lies, and survival.

Through its clumsy symbolism, overwrought set pieces and half assed attempts at being risqué, Bone Lake is ultimately a slick looking mess of a film that borrows from a myriad of horror and relationship thrillers that have come before it and never actually makes us care about any of the characters in this dynamic.

Director Mercedes Bryce Morgan cobbles together some fast paced sequences but saving the shock value for the first few minutes as we see a naked man take a crossbow shot through the testicles at a horizontal angle.  After that it really peters out as we have these couples who are supposedly all sexed up and horny for their weekend away do the most sexually vanilla things possible.  The film feels like it’s trying to channel the vibrancy and politics of someone like an Emerald Fennel but never commits to do anything that feels remotely ‘saucy’ on screen, rather it just sped up teasing it all and tries to create sexy tension by being in the dark half the time.

The dialogue from screenwriter Joshua Friedlander is just flat, clunky and lifted from the movies and genres that it’s borrowing from which makes it feel like an ‘erotic’ horror movie for anyone who has never seen anything remotely connected to any of those genres.  It’s trying be a story of gender dynamics, sexual needs and satisfaction while giving us no reason to connect to the material at all.  The whole thing isn’t nearly as smart at thinks it is.

Our four person ensemble (except for the two people who get murdered at the beginning) which consists of Alex Roe, Maddie Hasson, Marco Pigossi and Andra Nechita just don’t have a enough credits to their collective names to show us as an audience that they can carry a feature film.  Only Maddie Hasson who manages to find some classic ‘Final Girl’ energy in this piece feels like she belongs in a horror movie as the guy who plays her fiancé just comes off like a wet noodle and Roe & Nechita as the adversary’s to our happy couple just end up chewing the scenery to the point that even we as audience members will feel like we have indigestion.

Like most horror movies out there, Bone Lake will pop a decent opening weekend but it has so little substance to it outside of its surface trappings that you’ll wish you waited until it ended up streaming for free on Tubi, and even then it just won’t be very good.