On a lark, I recently decided to put on Bone Tomahawk, starring the incomparable Kurt Russell, making the grave mistake of judging a book by its cover, or more aptly, a film by its poster. Pulling the movie from the backlog of Westerns, I assumed, like a fool, that I was in for your typical cowboy shoot-em-up based solely on how anonymous its box art looked next to movies like 3:10 to Yuma and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (I haven’t watched a lot of Westerns).
Having finally watched the film, I feel I must apologize to director S. Craig Zahler. I wasn’t familiar with your game. Bone Tomahawk is a remarkably badass, instant classic that scarred me for life in the best way possible.
Bone Tomahawk starts off like the setup to a dad joke. A drifter named Purvis (David Arquette), a no-nonsense, magnificently mustachioed sheriff named Hunt (Russell), his daffy deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins), a haughty gunslinger named Brooder (Matthew Fox), and a doctor named Samantha (Lili Simmons) walk into a bar. Only, instead of a drawn-out punchline, Sheriff Hunt quickly draws on our drifter, and he’s taken away to be treated by the doctor on the detective’s deduction that the drifter was going to bring trouble with him into their small Old West town. Put a fork in it; the film might as well pull the curtain on itself at its 30-minute mark if it were your bargain-bin Western. Only, Bone Tomahawk is an entirely different beast of a film.
The next morning, a farmhand is brutally murdered, the sheriff’s office has been ransacked, and Purvis and Samantha are nowhere to be found. We’ve got a murder mystery in our breakfast, folks. The only evidence left at the scene of the crime(s) is a single arrow. According to the town’s professor (played by Castlevania Nocturne‘s Zahn McClarnon), the enigmatic figures responsible for the havoc are so severely cut off from humanity that anyone unfortunate enough to be in their vicinity long enough to be considered a neighbor steers clear of their “territory” out of self-preservation. Oh, and the townsmen stand no chance against them. Not leaving well enough alone, Sheriff Hunt, Chicory, and Brooder form a posse with Samantha’s bedridden husband, Arthur, and set out on a rescue mission, not knowing they’re roving into their doom.
Admittedly, I probably should’ve wised up to this being a horror movie in Western clothing the moment Patrick Wilson’s face graced my screen. That guy is as synonymous with horror as J.J. Abrams is with mystery box-style storytelling. But I didn’t catch that the movie was genuinely one of the most viscerally unnerving horror movies I’ve ever seen because its opening two acts settled into a comfortable rhythm as a surprisingly comfy, albeit anxiety-inducing Western.
Along the posse’s two-day trip into what’s essentially the dangerously darkened, unexplored parts of a map in a Soulsborne video game, Bone Tomahawk sets a comfortable pace where, despite the clear and present urgency of their mission, the quartet’s dynamic goes the way of an endearing little road trip. Despite looking the part of an old-timey western, Bone Tomahawk‘s snappy, seamlessly anachronistic dialogue gives it a timeless feel while making the camaraderie and dissent among its characters all the more palpable.
The front half of the movie sees the men go from having a kiki with one another, with the most non-sequitur “are you asleep yet” campfire conversations I’ve ever seen committed to film, to riding each other’s last nerves to the point of slugging each other the next moment. While Russell dominates the real estate as top billing for the film, Jenkins’ disarmingly charming performance as his naïve old codger of a deputy really steals the show as the connective tissue keeping its disparate men from tearing each other apart long before they even encounter the film’s big bad(s).
Once Bone Tomahawk kicks into its third act, it morphs into one of the most stark, frightening strings of events committed to celluloid. Up to this point, the film’s depiction of violence is handled matter-of-factly, without any sense of spectacle. There’s no buildup of tension when shit hits the fan on their journey; like breathing, it simply happens nonchalantly, with little zhuzh in the camera work to accentuate it. When the movie shifts into its final act and encounters the mysterious tribe at the epicenter of our heroes’ discontent, it becomes full-on horror, with some of the most terrifying depictions of violence and brutality I’ve ever seen.
On top of its action-packed final act’s pacing and cinematography moving with surgical precision, Bone Tomahawk surprised the fuck out of me with some of the most grotesque “How the hell did they even do that?” practical effects once its antagonists entered the film. I’m talking a full-body horror experience that burns into your retinas and whose booming bellows ring in your ears like tinnitus long after credits roll. It’s rare for a film to earn the accolade of being the best movie in a genre you’ve ever seen—a real instant classic—while seriously making you consider never watching it again for your own well-being.
Addressing the elephant in the room: the film’s depiction of its central antagonists, the troglodytes. While the film could very easily have leaned into irresponsible depictions of racism against Native American tribesfolk as cannibalistic savages, the Hollywood film surprised me in that it never dove into “this will age poorly” territory in its presentation of what’s essentially the movie’s horror monsters. Granted, a lot of that is aided by the movie having McClarnon’s character spell that out plainly before noping out of the film on some “I warned you, pal” vibes, similar to the Choctaw vampire hunters in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.
While folks deeper in their bags than I have drawn comparisons to how the film blends Beowulf, Eaters of the Dead, and The 13th Warrior (shout out, Collider), Bone Tomahawk‘s surprise cannibals are such a departure in their imposing and downright alien screen presence that they feel less like conscious racial caricatures and more like genuine S-tier horror villains. On paper, that sentiment might be hard to disseminate. But once you join me on the opposite end of life after watching Bone Tomahawk, you’ll understand why the film stands the test of time as an absolutely chimeric “we used to make movies”-ass western.
Bone Tomahawk is streaming on AMC+, Pluto TV, Xumo, Philo, and the Roku Channel.
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