Fiona

the thing about Zahler is that he's a hardcore cynic. if you've seen his other movies, you'll notice he has a real fondness for characters who are simultaneously likeable and deeply, profoundly wrong. he doesn't really do moral victories. he hardly does victories at all. he doesn't do lessons. he doesn't do redemption arcs.

look at Brooder. on paper, he's one of the movie's most competent and successful characters. he's handsome, capable, brave, and positioned as a romantic rival to Arthur. he's also a self-admitted killer of women and children. when he casually reveals this, the other men are visibly disturbed by it.

they're disturbed by it while riding off to kill people en masse, sight unseen.

that's the contradiction the movie is interested in.

to me, Bone Tomahawk is a movie about the inherent violence of the frontier. not just the explicit violence, but the violence required to exist there in the first place. every white character in that town is living inside a system built by conquest, displacement, law enforced at gunpoint, and the constant threat of death.

even the plot only exists because Purvis desecrates a burial ground. the people who get abducted are collateral damage, sure, but the movie goes out of its way to show that none of this happened in a vacuum. the violence didn't begin when Samantha was kidnapped.

honestly, the only characters i feel pretty uncomplicated pity for are Samantha and Nick.

Samantha spends almost every scene caring for other people. she tends wounds, removes shrapnel, looks after the sick, and even makes sure an imprisoned outlaw receives medical treatment. she's arguably the most consistently compassionate person in the entire movie. Nick is just a kid.

everyone else exists somewhere on a spectrum of constant systemic violence.

the christianity is another thing that really colors my reading. Zahler has never struck me as a religious filmmaker. if anything, i'd call him a Reddit Atheist. there's a noticeable disdain for religion running through a lot of his work. so when Arthur is constantly begging god for strength and protection, i don't read those scenes as triumphant. i read them as pitiful.

there's almost a sense of: "your wife is missing. isn't that enough? why are you talking to the sky? why do you need a cross around your neck?"

but then Arthur survives and suddenly that disdain transforms into something that feels almost like envy. not admiration. envy.

like, "maybe if i was capable of believing some bullshit that completely, i could survive the unsurvivable too."

and then there's the Professor. my feelings are mixed here; i wish his character had been way more impactful. i love the concept, but introducing a highly educated Native man whose entire purpose in the story is to explain that these people are not really considered Native Americans by surrounding tribes is disappointing. however, that’s the most explanation and the most Professor we get. they're described as cave-dwelling cultists. troglodytes. literal cavemen. their skin is a dusty bone-white. that's such a strange choice that i have a hard time believing it's coincidental.

the movie goes out of its way to separate them from actual Indigenous people (whether it’s effective in this is debatable) while simultaneously making them this grotesque reflection of the white frontier itself: isolated, violent, territorial, horrifically misogynist, and pale as death.

earlier, the men are horrified by Brooder's admission that he's killed women and children. they treat it as a line that shouldn't be crossed. and then they discover the trog women.

limbless. blinded. deafened. heavily pregnant. reduced to breeding stock.

and they leave them there.

i'm not even saying that's the wrong choice. i'm not sure there IS a right choice. that's what makes the scene so effective. suddenly, all those clean moral distinctions start collapsing.

Brooder killed women and children. that's monstrous.

the survivors refuse to kill women and children. that's civilized.

except… the women they “spare” have been mutilated beyond recovery, can't care for themselves, and now exist in a cave full of corpses with no one left to sustain them.

what exactly IS the merciful option there? the movie doesn't answer. it just leaves the question hanging in the air.

Zahler tends not to be interested in rewarding people for having the correct beliefs. he's interested in forcing those beliefs into situations where they become impossible to cleanly apply. the men get to keep their principles, and they also get to walk away from two unspeakably tortured, doomed women and the children growing inside them.

that's not a triumphant affirmation of morality. it's a brutal demonstration of how inadequate morality can feel when confronted with reality.

the troglodytes are dead, but the violence remains.

it survives in Arthur's broken body.

it survives in Samantha, who has seen things that cannot be described.

and it survives, however briefly, in those two women left behind in the darkness, suffering a fate the heroes couldn't bring themselves to end and couldn't possibly fix. so they just stop looking.

however, the final kiss is what really sells the movie's cynicism to me.

Samantha recoils when Arthur tries to kiss her because he's had the troglodyte whistle bones in his mouth. so he washes his face and tries again.

but washing his face doesn't actually change anything. there’s blood in his mouth. fragments of bone in his teeth. the only thing that's changed is what can be seen. suddenly the kiss is acceptable.