Bone Tomahawk

S. Craig Zahler – 2015 – USA

Bone Tomahawk is a strong work that successfully fuses and transcends the clichés of both the genres that it deals with, making it wholly different than jokey cross-genre movies that are always mixing zombies with cowboys or aliens with vampires or werewolves with Jane Austen or whatever the case may be.  Rather than describing it as a horror-western, more accurately Bone Tomahawk is a genuine western with some horror elements in it.  A handful of frontier townsfolk are kidnapped by savages in retaliation for a pair of bandits intruding upon some sort of sacred ground.  Echoing The Searchers, the film’s plot has the town sheriff (Kurt Russell) and the husband (Patrick Wilson) of one of the taken lead a small party to rescue them.  The twist is that the culprits are no Native Americans that we have seen or heard of before.  In fact, an Indian in town is adamant that these "troglodytes," as he calls them, have no relation to any of the Native tribes, not even those considered the most fearsome like the Comanche or Apache.  He warns that they are barely human and most likely invincible no matter how many men the rescue party takes along with them.  No one says as much, but the implication is clear that there may be something borderline supernatural about these troglodytes.  By not portraying any known primitive culture, writer/director Zahler could potentially be accused of being politically correct and making things easy on himself by avoiding controversy, but I really don't think that's what went on here.  The fictional troglodytes allow him to indulge his imagination in coming up with a pre-industrial tribe that could combine and amplify all the most frightening practices one could find among certain Indonesian or African peoples more than in Native American ones.  The film lulls you into a false sense of security as its first three quarters are devoted to the slow progression of Russell and company towards their objective; it's an effective character drama in which radically different personality types strain to cooperate while inadvertently revealing disparate motives.  What's great about this section of the film is that it works on its own, regardless of what it's leading to, because it's not a "revisionist” western and as such it zeroes in precisely on what the great westerns of the classic era were really about; the conflict between savagery and civilization, the quest to impose law upon disorder and to contain chaos with cultural institutions.  On a more personal level, westerns are also about the kind of men that were required to settle the west, often men who were too coarse to be welcome in the clean towns they helped to build.  Each of the men in the rescue party in Bone Tomahawk are on various rungs of the ladder of assimilation, though there is no moral superiority associated with any of them; the well-groomed, well-traveled gunslinger, for example (Matthew Fox), has little respect for anyone not of his own kind, and the husband, nursing a broken leg, appears utterly helpless – and is actually left behind at one point – but ultimately has the presence of mind to outsmart some of the troglodytes he encounters.