For its first 10 to 15 minutes, Audrey Cummings’ reversionistic feminist Western Place of Bones proves to be surprisingly perplexing. A lot of this initial confusion is perhaps because the film’s premise might wrongly lead viewers to expect something of a drama closer to Thomas P. Cullinan’s The Beguiled by the way of Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga — on a much smaller scale, of course. In a quite hasty introduction that can feel stock, a bit caricaturish of genre, and even a little cringey, we learn that Place of Bones takes place in 1876 and follows the duo of Pandora (Heather Graham) and Hester Meadows (Brielle Robillard), a pious Christian mother and her spry daughter, who in the absence of the family patriarch (deceased) live together alone on a remote, dried-up ranch in the middle of a godforsaken no man’s land. One morning, as is habit, Hester decides to visit her father’s grave near the cabin, but this time runs into a half-dead stranger, Austin Calhoun (Corin Nemec), lying on the ground; a bleeding-to-death outlaw whom the two women save and take care of by bringing him into their house. But it’s immediately after this father-figure stand-in wakes up from his unconscious state and he speaks about his brutal cohorts whom he has backstabbed — led by Bear John (Tom Hopper), the group are out to find Austin and the ill-gained loot they robbed from a bank — that Cummings’ satirical undertone and subversively post-modernist texture become evident. Place of Bones feels vividly influenced by the works of the Coen brothers — which occasionally makes it feel like excised section of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs — and Quentin Tarantino (especially when we get to some crazy blood-splattered scenes and a few shocking narrative twists), and these touchstones further unfold throughout the film.
Although Place of Bones’ generally straightforward narrative — at least, until its ultimate twist — and visual style, which fails to rise to the aesthetic originality of the Coens or QT, rarely aims for anything ambitious or singular, it compensates with measured, picaresque compositions. And if it remains a bit too moderate in personality to rise to the level of madcap zaniness, Graham and Robillard’s performances shape an off-beat mother-daughter dynamic that anchors the film, with Nemec’s amiable bantering and Cummings’ directorial instincts helping guide the film’s playful yet slow-burning narrative progression, its tongue-in-cheek wittiness, and its throwback, TV Western-inspired action sequences. This makes for an amusingly kitschy B-movie that emphasizes its core as a lighthearted romp and deliberately unburdens itself of any unnecessary or heavy-handed messaging. The results can become more mixed the closer we get to the film’s conclusion: for example, the absorbing suspense of Hester walking outside to locate a rifle right as the quartet of ruthless gunslingers closes in feels little like the climatic showdown and its undeniable lack of its tension or intensity (a little insanity would have even been welcome). It’s not enough to undo the small pleasures to be found in Place of Bones, but it does cast Cummings’ film more as an easily digestible trifle that you watch once than a future cult classic of genre filmmaking.
DIRECTOR: Audrey Cummings; CAST: Heather Graham, Tom Hopper, Corin Nemec, Donald Cerrone; DISTRIBUTOR: The Avenue; IN THEATERS/STREAMING: August 23; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 33 min.
