Place of Bones Review
Place of Bones (2023) Film Review, a movie directed by Audrey Cummings, written by Richard Taylor, and starring Heather Graham, Tom Hopper, Corin Nemec, Brielle Robillard, Donald Cerrone, Gattlin Griffith, and Zachary Keller.
Westerns are a fascinating film genre to dissect. Once a pillar of Hollywood that helped create some of the biggest stars in the game, like John Wayne, John Ford, Robert Mitchum, Clint Eastwood, and many, many more, now finds itself at an interesting fork in the road. Gone are the days of 9-figure studio budgets and A-list talent (unless you fund your own western epic like Kevin Costner); the western has gone underground. Traditional in nature, the genre has had to adapt to the ever-changing media landscape, not unlike many characters in these films who are thrust into the 20th century.
As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of all invention. Budget limitations and creative new technology have allowed filmmakers to explore different worlds through the lens of the American West, but unfortunately, Audrey Cummings’ Place of Bones is not one of those films. Because at the end of the day, the main ingredient in a western picture is heart and soul (any movie really), and that is something the actors, costumes, and story lack here.
The movie begins with Pandora (Heather Graham) and Hester (Brielle Robillard), our mother-daughter duo and leads of the film. They live in a secluded portion of the American West with no other towns, neighbors, or souls around. They don’t have much, but they have each other. Things are quiet around their homestead until an injured criminal named Calhoun (Corin Nemec) turns up not far from home. Out of the kindness of their blessed hearts, Pandora and Hester take in the outlaw and try to nurse him back to health, but his crew are on his tail. The story unfolds about exactly as you could picture it, save for the last 3 minutes of the film, which tries to pull the wool over your eyes with an uninformed twist. It felt lazy, boring, and far too predictable.
Let’s move onto the look of the film. Perhaps the most important element of a western. The jagged and sun-bleached landscapes, gnarled hair, and dirt that you can feel reach places you didn’t know existed. If a western is going to be anything, it needs to be realistic. Not necessarily in the story told, but in the setting, props, and costumes the actors possess to tell it. Heather Graham was horrifically miscast in this film. Aside from her maintaining a full face of makeup the entire movie and lush blonde hair that dared not have a single section of it out of place, the environment ate her up. I could only blame so much of it on the script, because I thought it was actually pretty good, but her performance left a tremendous amount to be desired. It’s funny too, because I was just praising her recent turnout in Joe Lynch’s Suitable Flesh, and she is an actor that I quite enjoy, but in the right film. And this wasn’t it.
Ambient lighting was constantly saturating areas that should be darkened by the lack of electricity, and the costumes were fine, if not boring (we can’t forget the bad cowboy has to wear a black hat!) The plot trudges along like a horse stuck in the mud until we get the big, bad twist. I wish I could give it away, so you didn’t have to waste 90 minutes of your life to figure it out, but instead I implore you to go read about it on some other forum that doesn’t show as much restraint.
The western genre is one that will never go away, and films like Bone Tomahawk and Old Henry show that there is an appetite for low-budget, well-made pictures, but Audrey Cummings didn’t get that memo.
Rating: 3/10
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