Queen of Bones opens with text evoking silent movie title cards: “folk tales of the great depression.” Whether or not this succeeds in setting us in a historical moment, it does, along with a sinister soundtrack of plucky strings and dark ambient undertones, place us firmly in a genre. Robert Budreau’s film is a folk-horror chamber piece that, despite a limited scope, manages to produce an original enough vision of the genre to appeal. In the film, a violin maker, Malcolm (Martin Freeman), lives on a remote Oregon homestead with his children, twins Lillian (Julia Butters) and Samuel (Jacob Tremblay). The two young actors are designed to be the heart of the film, and though these performances certainly won’t wind up being either’s best — Butters, for her part, has already given far better, across from Leonardo DiCaprio no less, as the precocious Trudi Fraser in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — their pre-adolescent awkwardness adds a certain necessary charm to Queen of Bones.
Though decidedly a horror film, Budreau’s project also bears a flavor of adventure — perhaps even of the innocent, childhood variety. We follow Lily and Sam as they quest for answers, journeying through the dark pine forest and interfacing with the outsiders of their community. The adults of the story serve somewhat more peripheral purposes, mostly either as obstacles or abettors. This recipe of questing teens and lurking horror makes the film feel at times like a throwback young adult flick, reminiscent at times of films as diverse as Stand by Me, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and Bridge to Terabithia. There’s something quite classical about a narrative that features young people finding an old, magical book hidden away and following its maps or figures. But Queen of Bones also fights against its own strengths. The shifting genre dynamic becomes more unbalanced as the screws of horror are turned tighter. It begins to feel more like the twisted fairytales of the Brothers Grimm, something like a dark Americana spin on “Hansel & Gretel.” In the end, folk horror must win out against teen adventure, leaving viewers to land in the muddy middle.
The mystery at the core of the twins’ quest regards their mother. Every year on their birthday, their father regales them with the same story: of how they lost their mother on the day of their births. He tells them that “in the midst of death there is life,” and Lillian repeats after him, year after year. But Sam doubts. He becomes skeptical, suspicious: “why does the story change?” As this unfolds, Lillian is changing, reaching puberty, and this milestone signals dread for her father. A grand metaphor is taking shape, conflating the darkness that Malcolm sees as witchcraft with the natural course of womanhood. This isn’t a new metaphor, of course; ever since Christianity has waged war on witches and curious people have stopped to think about it, seeing the pattern of patriarchs punishing women for being women, there has been art that uses witch trials as a metaphor for misogyny. In cinema, we have Haxan (1922), which examines the history of myth and inquisition, introducing indelible images into the lexicon of motion picture witchcraft. Then there’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Suspiria (1977), The Juniper Tree (1990), Lords of Salem (2012), The VVitch (2015) — all stories involving witchcraft and rooting their narratives in a woman’s personal struggles or coming of age. The most recent film in that list, Robert Eggers’ moody, puritanical folk horror bombshell, is the most obvious antecedent of Queen of Bones, having set the stage for an indie-Hollywood revival of bespoke folk horror of this ilk.
On some level, this grand metaphor works regardless of its efficacy to the story, if for no other reason than, historically, it’s true. To the oppressive, fundamentalist parent — especially a father and particularly Malcolm — the line between teenage girl and witch becomes blurred. Queen of Bones approaches this storied lineage and knotty history with the flimsiest of signifiers, relying on and straining Butters’ performance. Her youthful sincerity does go quite a way, but the measly material doesn’t help, nor does asking Butters and Tremblay to flesh out dialogue with a kind of obvious tremor that will make many eyes roll. Upon finding a tattered book filled with kitschy, vaguely witchy drawings, they speculate, “Maybe it’s a witch book,” an observation that hardly needed to be announced to an audience. But the young talent is only partly responsible for this inconsistency. There’s a gap between their earnest naïveté and the film’s intended vibe, which reaches for a more elevated plane of folk horror. There even seems to be an attempt at heightening the performances into a register of artificially archaic affect, despite the setting being the early 1930s rather than the 1630s of The VVitch. Even a veteran like Freeman winds up fumbling with the dubious dialogue he is given.
Though limited by a lesser budget, Queen of Bones mitigates some of its failings by constructing a specific visual identity. Driven by loose, sweeping Steadicam shots and leering wide-angle close-ups, the film’s aesthetic thankfully deviates from the muted colors and old-timey compositions that mark it as a period piece. (In this, it even recalls Better Angels, A.J. Edwards’ experimental drama on the childhood of Abraham Lincoln.) Queen of Bones’ peculiarities are its strengths, and the buoyancy of its visual language elevates the limited intrigue it establishes elsewhere. The macabre forest and tingling, wind-swept meadows are captured in lush digital frames that almost sparkle like wet-plate landscapes. This visual panache aids the story as it drives deeper into the “darkness” that Lily is awakening to. Nature opens its arms to her and she follows its lead — the croaking of the bullfrog, the cry of the owl, the rising of the wind — further into mystery. Very little substance is added to the familiar metaphor underpinning her coming of age in all this, but the unfolding of her and Sam’s quest at least gives the grace of morphing into a string of memorable moments. Thanks to this, Queen of Bones will certainly hold more appeal for the folk horror aficionado than the average moviegoer, and more still for those craving a revival of creepy, twisted young adult adventures. It will, however, also still leave something to be desired for each of these audiences. Budreau would have done well to wring more from André Pienaar’s vivid cinematography, and from the vitality-rich screen presences of Butters and Tremblay. Instead, we’re ultimately left to sift through a mixed bag filled with too many missed opportunities.
DIRECTOR: Robert Budreau; CAST: Julia Butters, Martin Freeman, Jacob Tremblay, Patricia Phillips, Taylor Schilling; DISTRIBUTOR: Falling Forward Films; IN THEATERS: August 1; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 30 min.
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