Place of Bones

Canadian director Audrey Cummings delivers a successful Western that knows how to survive thanks to its good final stretch with one of the craziest climaxes of 2024.

It is a low-budget film and it shows in both its production and its set design, but with all that it manages to give a fairly successful film that is strengthened by having a fairly recognized cast that gives some prestige to a simple, straightforward and somewhat everyday script, but that is inspired in its final part to compensate for all the flaws that we can find with a truly mind-blowing twist.

The grace is in knowing how to solve the strong points of the script that allow you to stay away from all the situations that are happening, it knows how to use tension, drama and humor to always keep you up to date with everything that is happening, to then completely let go and give a pleasant surprise in its resolution to everything that was built up for us previously.

A film reminiscent of a low-budget Western that isn't perfect, that has many simplistic things and perhaps a bit of cheesy dialogue, but in the end it is an achieved result and we end up having a film with which we really have a good time without realizing it, a rewarding bet in its right measure.

This is obviously going to try and be one of those gritty, how it really was, Westerns. You know the type - the poverty, the danger, the dirt, the easy way men kill others. Then you quickly realise this is not gritty like American Primeval or 1823 are.

The best actor by far is Corin Nemec who plays a man, Calhoun, who's been shot and is found by a mother and daughter who live in a wooden shack with barely any furniture or change of clothes but the shack does have a large window of stained glass panels. Why? The shack is in a rocky valley - so how do they grow crops and where are the animals? No horses, cows, not even a chicken. Perhaps it was a very tight budget that couldn't stretch to livestock!

By being there, Calhoun has brought trouble and there is the inevitable misunderstandings, gun fight and deaths.

I did not see the end coming and it is almost worth watching the film for that, otherwise, really don't bother.

I don't understand how people are giving this such glowing reviews. The acting is lifeless, it comes across as if they are actually just reading the lines. The dialogue is so cliched I can confidently say it must have been written by Yosemite Sam. The locations consist of one small house with barn and outhouse and one wooded area, that's pretty much it.

So after 60-80 minutes of not very much you get a very lazy shootout and a twist ending which really should have been the idea for the whole plot instead of just a twist.

Better acting or a better script, or better action, any of those would have raised this up to be a 5 star movie but all of them just fail.

It was quite clichéd throughout. A desperate widow and her daughter live alone in the middle of nowhere, with no horses or obvious farming-just a grave for her deceased husband and nothing else. I thought the girl was feeding chickens, but there are no chickens to be fed; she's just scattering small stones around. One day they end up with a con man and a bunch of stolen money in their cabin. How will they survive the real bad guys who are after the con man? I watched with many questions until, at the very end, everything falls into place. This is one of those movies where you can expect a sequel. Just for the ending, my rating goes from 5 to 8.

A woman and teenage daughter are forced to defend themselves when an injured man attracks outlaws to their homestead.

This is a very B movie. The storyline is quite predictable but attempts to put a little twist on the ending. The writing, character development and overall atmosphere leaves a lot to be desired. Poor dialog, uninteresting characters and forced acting feels cringy, unnatural and much like a community theater performance. I felt myself forcing interest to finish watching it. The twist also falls flat.

This is not a film I'll be recommending to anyone unless they're just looking for something challenging to watch from beginning to the end.