Bone Lake (2025) Review!!

Synopsis – A couple’s vacation at a secluded estate is upended when they’re forced to share the mansion with a mysterious couple. A dream getaway spirals into a nightmarish maze of sex, lies, and manipulation, triggering a battle for survival.

My Take – I get it why Airbnb horror has been blowing up as a popular sub-genre in recent years. Mainly as millions of people are ready to move into vacation rentals without doing even the very basic research, and for someone who actually does that, there’s something quite unsettling about these familiar yet often isolated settings. Making them a perfect setup for a slasher flick.

Joining this ongoing barrage of films is this latest from director Mercedes Bryce Morgan (Spoonful of Sugar) who uses writer Joshua Friedlander‘s script to create something of a cross between Barbarian (2022), Speak No Evil (2024) and Funny Games (1997), all under the guise of an erotic thriller.

Unfortunately, despite the immense potential, it never lives up to the promise of its exciting premise. It is neither as sexy nor as enjoyably violent as it advertises itself to be, and even when things do blow up in the final act, it seems to be done for the sake of shock value.

Sure, very few thrillers open on a sweaty close-up of a man’s ball sack being ripped in half by a crossbow bolt, and even fewer can live up to the limit of such grisliness, but the following that the film simply struggles to live up to its opening ten minutes. As expected in this type of psycho-sexual thriller with plenty of mind games, there is a twist or two.

And yet the twists are not surprising at all, even when they appear to be angling for in the beginning. There is a lot of tease for where it could have all gone, and yet it ends up in a direction that will certainly divide a crowd and leave plenty of room for discussion.

The story follows Sage (Maddie Hasson) and Diego (Marco Pigossi) who head to a beautiful lake-view property to reignite their romantic connection. Diego is a community college professor who has just left his job to focus on his novelist dreams full-time, forcing Sage to leave her the comforts of her freelancing work and get into the breadwinner role. Sage is uncomfortable about taking on so much financial pressure, especially since it is quite clear she is not exactly sexually satisfied with Diego, and because her own creative writing is taking a pause to feed his.

To make matters more uncomfortable, soon another conventionally attractive 30-something straight couple arrives in the form of Cin (Andra Nechita) and Will (Alex Roe), insisting that they, too, booked the gargantuan house for the weekend. But since, Sage and Diego are nice people, they agree that the four can stay in the house together. And of course, not all is as it seems, as tensions rise via dangerous games, manipulation tactics and strategic methods of seduction that challenge the couples.

This new thriller from director Mercedes Bryce Morgan, without a doubt an exciting new voice in genre film making, is essentially about the ultimate test of romantic resiliency. The main couple at its center are pushed to the limits of what can be expected of humans in any situation, let alone one that makes them doubt how fit they are to be together.

To do that it uses game motifs even presenting the audience with visuals of pornographic chess pieces and offers a central theme of the importance of trust and honesty in partnerships, ideas that surface with varying levels of success throughout the film’s 94-minute runtime.

The thing that the film does right is explore a relationship between a couple whose sex life has turned sour because of resentment and a lack of fulfillment like how Diego’s resignation of his job has made Sage as the primary earner, causing friction between the two. But even when the audience learns of this information, there’s still a sense that there’s more to this pair’s backstory. Unfortunately, Diego and Sage’s relationship is really the only interesting part of the film. Once the film moves into its horror elements and reveals the intentions of the mysterious couple showing up to the house out of the blue, it ventures into absurd territory.

Not only is the twist pretty obvious early on, something which makes the narrative lose all of its suspense about halfway through, but Cin and Will’s motives seem mostly nonsensical, and the details surrounding their relationship and backstory feel like a shock factor grab without any real rhyme or reason. Also, the film delivers way less boning than it promises.

Yes, once the third act arrives and shifts into slasher territory, the film does claw back some brownie points for its practical effects and gore, both of which are freakishly realistic. That said, these positives aren’t enough to elevate the film to greatness because it ends up becoming something we have seen many times before, and contains nothing distinguishable to set it apart from the rest.

Performance wise, Andra Nechita and Alex Roe make for a compellingly wacky couple, even when narrative fails them completely. Marco Pigossi is believable as the disheartened writer and manages to be immediately relatable. However, Maddie Hasson is manages to be a show-stealer as the headstrong and assured lead. She’s natural even when the proceedings begin to override logic. On the whole, ‘Bone Lake‘ is a generic Airbnb horror that not only does not bring anything new or interesting to the table, but also falls short on execution.