Director – Matthias Hoene, Screenplay – Neil Linpow, Producers – Leonora Danby, James Harris & Mark Lane, Photography – Jon Reineke, Music – Christopher Carmichael, Visual Effects – Richard Blackburn, Special Effects – Encore SFX, Production Design – Nuha Mekki. Production Company – Particular Crowd/Tea Shop Productions.
Cast
Joely Richardson (Rose), Sadie Soverall (Maisy), Neil Linpow (Jack Byrne), Harry Cadby (Matty Byrne), Roger Ajogbe (Pa), Clifford Samuel (PC Adams), Cameron Jack (McAlister), Sharon Young (Bella)
Plot
Rose and her teenage daughter Maisy maintain a farm in the English countryside, while tending Rose’s vegetative husband. On one stormy night, they are interrupted by a knock at the door, which proves to be Matty Byrne, carrying his brother Jack who has been wounded in a car crash nearby. Rose patches Jack up and grants them shelter. As becomes apparent, the two brothers are fleeing following a robbery that went wrong. However, as the police manhunt enters the area in the search for them, Jack becomes aware that Rose hides secrets within the house.
Little Bone Lodge was the third film from German director Matthias Hoene, who had worked in music video before making the horror serial Beyond the Rave (2008), which marked the revival of Hammer Films. Hoene made his first film with the well acclaimed Cockneys vs Zombies (2012) and then on to make the Luc Besson written/produced The Warriors Gate (2016) in which a videogame nerd is transported back to Ancient China.
There was a spate of films that began a few years ago – in fact, dates all the way back to Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs (1991) – in which house burglars or petty criminals enter a home only to be imprisoned or stumble upon something even worse. There was another variant soon after with From Dusk Till Dawn (1996). The theme has taken off in recent years with the likes of The Collector (2009), Don’t Breathe (2016), Bad Samaritan (2018), Monster Party (2018), Villains (2019), The Owners (2020), Hounded (2022) and The Price We Pay (2022).
Little Bone Lodge changes the basics from these other films slightly – it has two wanted criminals on the run with the proceeds from a robbery, while the point-of-view shifts from the criminals, as it always is in these other films, to the home owners, mother Joely Richardson and teenage daughter Sadie Soverall, before the secrets of the house start to be revealed.
Joely Richardson defends her home
At the outset, Little Bone Lodge appears to be about the fugitives entering into a house of tensions, even if you can’t identify what is wrong with the situation. The script, which comes from Neil Linpow, who also plays the more intellectually adept of the two brothers, dutifully twists and turns, providing complications on the situation and placing the screws on the characters as various police and other members of the criminal gang arrive.
On the other hand, the surprises when unveiled never quite come with the shock effect that they should have – they are muted because it is not always clear what is going on in the house, or even exactly what sort of crime the brothers are fleeing from. By the time of the multiple complications and twists that occur in the farmyard near the end, it feels like the plot is conducting twists and turns for their own sake.
The film gains your attention with its title Little Bone Lodge, although as the story unfolds it is not entirely clear what this means. [PLOT SPOILERS] It is eventually revealed that Joely Richardson is keeping Sadie Soverall a prisoner in revenge for the death of her own family years ago. There’s a woman upstairs also kept prisoner where it appears that Joely has removed her limbs, which may have been used to create the bone knives we see throughout, although the whys of this are not apparent.
