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| Bone Lake Photo: courtesy of Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment |
Director Mercedes Bryce Morgan's Bone Lake, written by Joshua Friedlander, follows couple Sage (Maddie Hasson) and Diego (Alex Roe), who rent a lakeside property for a weekend break to reconnect. Unfortunately, their plans are disrupted when they realise the house has been double-booked. The other couple, Will (Marco Pigossi) and Cin (Andra Nechita), seem harmless enough at first, but soon Sage and Diego find themselves subjected to their manipulative mind games that descend into a violent and gruesome standoff.
Morgan's previous credits include the feature films Spoonful Of Sugar, about a young woman who takes a break from her studies to care for a sickly young boy, and Fixation, that revolves around a series of strange psychiatric tests for a young woman who is to be sentenced for murder. She has also directed the series Stargate Origin and the feature film Stargate Origin: Catherine.
In conversation with Eye For Film, Morgan discussed preparing the audience for the film's tonal shifts, creating a fun, popcorn experience with real characters and finally getting to play with comedy.
Paul Risker: When you’re making a movie, are you watching any specific films to help stir your creativity? And are you attentive to creating a specific experience for the audience?
Mercedes Bryce Morgan: I definitely do. I try to get myself in the headspace of what this type of world is, and some of the movies I've watched for this were Funny Games, and Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? Even though it's a different genre.
You want people to give into what the tone of the genre is. There are a couple of things I tried with this to give the audience that experience. And because we have antagonists later on in the film that are so absurd and heightened, I was trying to make our protagonists grounded so that when things get crazy, we can relate to them and go along for the ride.
Also, as a big horror fan, I love it when I care about the people that are dying. There are a lot of horror movies when someone dies where I'll think, 'That was fun. Let's keep going.' But with this, I wanted you to go, "Oh, no, please don't hurt them."
PR: Bone Lake's opening scene is a powerful one that immediately commands the audience’s attention. What was your thought process behind this opening?
MBM: This scene was not originally in the script. It originally opened with Sage and Diego sitting in the car having a conversation. As a team, we said we needed a situation where we'd be afraid something dangerous was going to happen. And especially because this movie is more of a European erotic thriller in the first half, and then we get into horror in the back half, we wanted to let people know what was coming. So, we needed to really give them an insight into the intensity that's to come and not waste their time. We decided to have nudity in a forest with violence, and an arrow through the testicle, to give them a little taste [laughs].
PR: How did you become involved in the project and how much involvement did you have in rewriting the script?
MBM: Some scripts, I'll take a break, and I'll go do something else, some other work. I read this one straight through because I was invested in what was going to happen — I was worried about these characters. And when the plot twist happened, I audibly said, "Oh my God." I yelled to my partner in the other room, "I can't believe this just happened."
The script went through so many revisions, where, for example, in the opening scene, they're having troubles in their sex life. In the original script, it was just dandy, and then we realised there were problems later. I wanted to bring that up so it would pay off later in the film. So, there were a lot of little things like that throughout the script that we worked through together and molded to make it what it is now.
We wanted to create this entertaining, fun popcorn movie where you could have a fun time, but let's also share these real characters. And I've been told a lot that couples really appreciate it. I've even had couples say to me afterwards, "We dealt with this in our relationship, and it raised our hair a little bit. Then we felt good about it."
PR: Bone Lake is playful in the way you find your sympathies shifting back and forth between Sage and Diego. But in your opinion, is one stronger than the other?
MBM: I wanted to look at both of them as real people because a bad version of this movie is you side with one person and not the other. And that's not fun, or it's not the way we should examine characters.
And it really depends on who's watching. I might have my preconceived notion going into a script, and then when we edit and I talk to different people, I find they have different answers. I like to make movies for the audience and so I like people to tell me who they side with because it's telling about who they are.
PR: Films are like mirrors that offer us a bit of insight into who we are, right?
MBM: There are movies I watched when I was younger, and I didn't understand what divorce is. When you then go through your parents' divorce, you suddenly relate to the movie. Or you encounter death, or you have issues in your relationships, and it creates different perspectives within you. That's why it's fun to watch your favourite movies every couple of years, to see how you have changed.
PR: Do you think your female gaze influences the way you shoot sex or sexualised scenes?
MBM: You can see with some of the female characters who were sexual in the Nineties and early 2000s erotic thrillers, that it was kind of a bad thing, because their sexuality was out of control. And I think we've now come around to understand that it isn't necessarily a bad thing if a woman is sexual. And in Bone Lake, we wanted our protagonist to have a good sex life.
The way that I approach it is we have either no nudity for both men and women, or you have it for both. And the stance that we took here was that it's for both, and that's the equaliser. At least that's my way of looking at it.
PR: What place does Bone Lake occupy in your overall filmography?
MBM: There are certain storylines that shouldn't be taken too seriously, and I don't want them to be. What was exciting for me about this, was making something that is a mishmash of genres: horror and thriller. But what I especially liked about this compared to my other movies is we were able to have more of a comedic tone to it. And that's something I've always wanted to do with my films. So, that's what I'm especially excited about with this one and going forward.
PR: Are you interested in exploring mashing up genres and shifting tones more?
MBM: First of all, horror has a passionate built-in audience. But I also think that because we're in this metamodern era, we're allowed to look at different genres in a way that is genuine instead of making fun of them. And so that's what I'm really excited about, because I feel like audiences are too smart to not know all the different genres. That makes it harder sometimes to tonally shift or easier because you have to play with the tropes of different genres to be able to do it.
Bone Lake played at the 2025 edition of London FrightFest.
