Newfound fans of Kevin Costner’s recent epic western Horizon are going to have to wait some additional, unspecified months to catch the next installment, which was recently bumped off of its August release date in favor of a later berth, supposedly to allow the first film to find an audience via streaming. Whether Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 will go straight to streaming after premiering in Venice seems (as yet) undetermined. There have been some rumors of Netflix interest, as the streamer has supposedly had their eye on their own version of the Costner-starring western series Yellowstone for quite some time.
Is Netflix testing those waters by bringing the 2015 western Bone Tomahawk to its service? Hard to say – but any fans of Horizon who haven’t seen it… well, actually, stand a pretty good chance of feeling repulsed by S. Craig Zahler’s half-minimalist, half-maximalist oater. At the same time, it does share some basic DNA with Horizon’s approach to the western-adventure canvas. Both movies start off with a number of seemingly unconnected characters – though while many of these characters remain separate as the first chapter of Horizon draws to a close, Zahler’s film does eventually bring them together. At first, we see a pair of sketchy, bedraggled drifters – human vultures, more like – murdering and ransacking their way through a small desert encampment. We also meet the affectionate married couple Arthur (Patrick Wilson) and Samantha (Lili Simmons); a small-town sheriff Franklin Hurt (Kurt Russell) and his deputy (Richard Jenkins); a bartender (Fred Melamed); and self-styled intellectual John Brooder (Matthew Fox).
From there, however, the movie gradually eliminates characters, rather than continuing to introduce them. In a nighttime attack, possibly spurred by the presence of one of the drifters from earlier, Samantha is kidnapped, and so Arthur (already wounded thanks to a homestead accident), Franklin, the deputy, and Brooder set off to rescue her. Not all of them die on this journey (some of them don’t even come along), but the narrowing of the ensemble still brings to mind horror movies, as does the gruesome violence, and antagonists that are like an old-west version of mutants from The Hills Have Eyes.
Technically, they’re part of a Native tribe, which is probably why early in the film, Zahler trots out a friendly Native to disavow this group – who he refers to as the Troglodytes – that engages in cannibalism and incest. As in Horizon, the Native characters are used to jumpstart some truly gruesome, horrifying violence – and Zahler is even more ambiguous (or is it downright cagey?) about what we’re meant to take away from this. Is he turning the Natives into monsters as a way of further caricaturing, even satirizing, how these characters have been portrayed in so many past westerns? Or is he just making excuses to keep portraying them as subhuman? It’s similar to his cop thriller Dragged Across Concrete, where the movie seemed both aware of its’ characters racism, and suspiciously eager to revel in it for entertainment.
Also like Concrete, Bone Tomahawk muddies its own waters by feeding its most racist characters some of his most eloquent, witty, writerly dialogue. Though Zahler loves to sink into unpleasant processes – including, for example, a fairly lengthy scene where Arthur writhes and swears in agony as he attends to the worsening wound on his leg – his dialogue scenes never feel like his most indulgent moments, because of the obvious pleasure he takes in finding his characters’ personalities through what they dwell on, conversationally. That’s particularly true of the Richard Jenkins character, whose mild-mannered dim-wittedness becomes oddly winning even as it vexes those around him.
Despite its horror-movie gnarliness, then, Bone Tomahawk offers much of the fleeting pleasure Horizon provides, with actual narrative closure and a somewhat tighter runtime. (It’s the shortest of Zahler’s movies, at a mere 130 minutes.) The matter-of-fact hardcore violence might alienate some old-school western fans, and there’s no promise of vaster landscapes to come. In fact, it’s not just the cast that constricts as it goes on; though there’s some widescreen landscape cinematography, by the end of the movie the characters are squaring off in a dark cave. Western audiences and horror audiences are understandably considered pretty far apart on the movie-watcher spectrum, but there are filmmakers who seem to have an affinity for both, maybe because they each inevitably traffic in violence and the unknown. (Ti West, director of the X trilogy, also made a little-seen and pretty good western called In a Valley of Violence.) Bone Tomahawk, by resembling Horizon while doing something completely different, suggests that frontier horrors are a natural fit.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
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