Women should be leading more Westerns; it leads to a different perspective and a change in the content itself. The Emmy-winning Netflix miniseries Godless (2017) certainly helped set some things in motion, and the recent Emily Blunt miniseries The English was phenomenal. In recent years, it’s fun to see household name Heather Graham (Boogie Nights, The Hangover) embrace the genre, having recently starred in The Last Son and finished filming The Gunslingers with Nicolas Cage. And now there’s Place of Bones, a Western thriller.
Touted as a horror-thriller, it’s actually unfortunate that Place of Bones doesn’t lean into the horror elements of home invasion movies enough. Directed by Audrey Cummings and written by Richard Taylor, Place of Bones is generally straightforward with its Western tropes, but Tom Hopper makes for a good villain and the female-empowered energy throughout breathes fresh new life into the genre.
Heather Graham Presents Pandora’s Box of Survival Tips
In Place of Bones, Graham plays a likable, takes-no-crap mom persona, and hasn’t lost any of the energy or charm she displayed 25 years ago in Austin Powers. It also helps that she’s given a great symbolic name, Pandora, in her new Western, but when we meet her, it’s already been a tough road for the reclusive outlaw. She’s widowed, with the “place of bones” belonging to her deceased husband, buried just a matter of feet away from her secluded residence in the mountains.
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It’s a sad sight but a peaceful one as well, with Pandora confidently living within a routine that works alongside her teenage daughter, Hester (Brielle Robillard). Graham is reliably appealing in everything she appears in. Here, she’s donning a uniquely Southern accent as she whips her sole offspring into shape, all in the name of safety — which, of course, becomes all the more threatened as we go, just like any memorable Western thriller will promise.
The threat comes in the form of a gravely injured outlaw who we later learn is named Calhoun (Corin Nemec). Pandora may be already versed in the axiom, “When death comes knocking on your door,” because she doesn’t exactly welcome Calhoun’s impromptu visit once he quite literally collapses at her front stoop with bloodied leg torn up by bullets.
Evil Tom Hopper Comin’ in Hot
Pandora undoubtedly has a moral center — another reason why we favor the stern mother throughout this story — which is why she doesn’t exactly kick Calhoun to the wayside upon his unannounced pop-in. Instead, she takes him in, tends to his wounds and feeds him — but Place of Bones always thrives on a through line of female empowerment, which means Pandora won’t just bow down to the male before her. She means business, as depicted through Graham’s beautiful but piercing eyes — does she age, by the way?
She wants him out ASAP, especially since she’s clearly intelligent and can pick up on Calhoun’s increasing sense of shadiness once he comes to and starts dodging questions about what led him to this lowly state. Calhoun, as we finally learn, is being hunted by a villainous bank robber and his gang of crooks. The head honcho who’s out for Calhoun’s blood is called Bear John, and he’s played with a certain ferocity from The Umbrella Academy star Tom Hopper, miles away from his recent charming rom-com role in Space Cadet.
A Formulaic Action Finale
At least Hopper’s Bear John provokes a healthy dose of shoot ’em up action in Place of Bones, just when moviegoers might start to fret that things are sadly slowing to a halt at Pandora’s home. It’s certainly comedic watching her and Calhoun bicker and fire Southern-drawl insults at each other, once, but the film takes much too long to essentially get to the point. And as a result, we don’t get enough of Tom Hopper’s great villain.
When the showdown actually happens, it fuels the fire in Pandora’s fierce and empowered soul, and she more than holds her own. It’s great to see Pandora purge her grief through cathartic acts of violence, but it’s ultimately a by-the-numbers conclusion that plays out in predictable fashion. The film needed to lean more into the intense violence that was advertised, with Place of Bones never approaching the intensity and innovation of must-see Western thrillers, but it’s still a serviceable movie with an appreciated focus on the life of a widow.
From The Avenue, Place of Bones was released Aug. 23 in theaters and digital platforms like YouTube, Google Play, and Apple TV through the link below:
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