Get In the Bone

An English family fleeing mysterious scandal in their home country establish themselves at a sprawling homestead in rural Maine. Things get weirder from there in 2017's Marrowbone. Produced by J.A. Bayona, now best known for Amazon's The Rings of Power, it's much like that series in that it feels like the makers of it have seen lots of quality productions and tried to cobble together their own from impressions rather than feelings. The result is formulaic, sometimes ridiculous, but occasionally pretty.

Allie (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a young American woman who meets the family, headed by matriarch Rose (Nicola Harrison). Rose has three boys and a girl. When she dies, Jack (George MacKay) becomes head of the family and the siblings decide to hide their mother's death for fear of being separated and adopted.

The film has clear moments that present us with missing information and most viewers will be waiting for a twist ending, having been trained by various movies from M. Night Shyamalan and his imitators that began to lose popularity roughly a decade earlier. Writer/director Sergio G. Sanchez's answer to this problem is to nest multiple twists in the end. It results in an intensely plot driven film and the characters therefore feel like they're held at arm's length, functioning essentially as pawns in a chess puzzle. Some of the contortions the story's obliged to go through in order to serve the plot are really silly, particularly a crucial moment where Allie is informed of many of the family's secrets via a handmade scrapbook that was left for her in the hollow of a boulder. It's a cloyingly precious moment that will try the viewer's patience since the plot at this point is in a position of critical suspense, in which Allie learning the truth before the following day is crucial to the family's survival.

Imagine the local authorities are due to confiscate all your property, separate your family, publish scandal about you, and your way of handling it is to get out the construction paper, yarn, and crayons and spend all night laboriously designing, compiling, and sketching. I'd say someone deserves a trip to the funny farm.

I won't spoil the end of the film but, I think, it must certainly have come from a devotee of Michel Foucault. Some people might like that but I was rolling my eyes. The cinematography is pretty, though, and there are good performances by Anna Taylor-Joy, Mia Goth, and Kyle Soller.