Bone Tomahawk

Bone Tomahawk (2015) follows four men riding out to recover three people who have been taken. Most of the running time is the journey and the talking: a sheriff, his injured deputy, a vain gunman and an old back up deputy. Then they arrive, and the western becomes horror. It is S. Craig Zahler's first film as director. He was a novelist first and had written over forty original screenplays for Hollywood, only one of which had been produced. Experts told him this script would take sixty days and ten million dollars. Zahler held the schedule down and shot it at Paramount Ranch in California in twenty one days for 1.8 million. Kurt Russell was making The Hateful Eight around the same time and had to reconcile the two looks. In his own words, his appearance here was a halfway house, part of the way to where he was going. The film's reputation rests on one scene in the cave. Zahler chose to shoot that violence coldly, in long takes, rather than as spectacle. It runs 133 minutes. Good for: the western crossed with horror, slow structures built on dialogue, and Kurt Russell. Less good for: that scene is genuinely hard to withstand and the warning is not overstated. The cave dwellers are never humanised, and the film drew serious criticism over its depiction of native people; calling them a fictional tribe does not answer the objection.