Place of Bones – Wild West Meets Day of the Woman

The road to a feminist Western revenge film may be paved with good intentions, but it doesn’t always lead to the right destination.

Audrey Cummings’ Place of Bones is a feminist Western revenge thriller that could have taken its pacing and the interaction between its three main protagonists to a whole new level of excitement. The film drastically varies in the range of its acting, with some actors playing their characters over-the-top, and others keeping them grounded, despite their caricatured versions of characters who lean on Western tropes.

The story is a tale of motherhood, feminine power, owning, and protecting the land. Heather Graham -stunning but lacking the grounded talent for taking on a role like that- plays Pandora, an annoying, pious, Christian woman who plays mother to Hester (Brielle Robillard), a semi-rebellious teenage girl. Living together on a secluded ranch, where their days were repetitive and dry, Pandora fills her daughter’s days with books, learning, and religion. Until an accident brings a fatally wounded man named Calhoun (Nemec) to their ranch, events unfold as brutally and unexpectedly as one ricochet after the other. Not alone, Calhoun attracted a group of former associates who are intent on getting back on him, and anyone who supports him.

It’s a tough world for women in the 1800s. The film makes audiences wonder whether Pandora has done the right thing by stashing her daughter out in the dreary land of nowhere, but then it shifts from delinquents to mother-daughter refugees in isolation and the viewer starts to understand Pandora’s rationale, even when her actions are sometimes frustrating. 

Place of Bones struggles with keeping up a consistent pace. At times it’s a dialogue-heavy drama, alongside some of the more philosophical female-led Westerns such as Godless and The Beguiled. At others, it is a chilling, edge-of-your-set suspenseful, and bloody feminist Western. It feels like a feature split in two; one is a play-to-screen adaptation about life in the Southern 1800s, and the other is an old-school, gender-bending exciting, and vicious Western, that shows how the harshness of life on the outskirts of the world, and how a world of every man for their own, needs a woman capable of taking it down by the arms.

Performances vary from drastic and tragic to wild and titillating. Nemec specifically shines as Calhoun, playing the role with such a jackal-like energy that audiences will barely anticipate what he’s after. Despite spending almost all of the film in bed, the intensity of his tone, eye work, and body language make up for a rather dull, immobile character. The dynamics of his shifting morality, misogyny, and unreliable narration compensate for a stationary role that in another, less capable actor would have been disastrous and dull. On the other hand, Graham only succeeds in making the stunning Pandora chafing and lip-biting piousness get on one’s nerves quickly. Robillard’s Hester, is a breath of fresh air within the harsh atmosphere of the film. Her performance may need a little improvement, but for the most part, she has a face for the screen, and hopefully, we see her in more films.  

In the end, it’s easy to see the place of inspiration and rigor that Cummings comes from as a director. Place of Bones takes viewers on a The Hateful Eight ride of paranoia and deceit, no one trusts anyone, except the mother’s love for her daughter. The color grading perfectly fits a dying world, and an engulfing motherly love that may or may not suffocate a child out of protection, and the film’s tone fits the grim tale at its core.

still courtesy of The Avenue

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Jaylan Salah Salman

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