Movie Review: PLACE OF BONES

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: August 23rd, 2024 / 01:03 AM

PLACE OF BONES movie poster | ©2024 The Avenue

Rating: R
Stars: Heather Graham, Tom Hopper, Corin Nemec, Brielle Robillard, Gatlin Griffith, Zachary Keller, Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone
Writer: Richard Taylor
Director: Audrey Cummings
Distributor: The Avenue/Highland Film Group
Release Date: August 23, 2024

PLACE OF BONES is, for the most part, a sturdy period Western, economically shot in and around a small mountain farmhouse and its outbuildings, with a few detours to surrounding trails.

We get an overview of brown mountains sporting scrubby brushes. The widowed Pandora Meadows (Heather Graham) and her teen daughter Hester (Brielle Robillard) live out here in their flat-roofed stone farmhouse on their own, since the death of Pandora’s husband/Hester’s father Tom.

We see that there are no animals and no neighbors; we learn that the nearest town is ninety-five miles away. Pandora, a religious and erudite woman, wants Hester to have a good vocabulary, but sees no need for the young woman to socialize. Pandora and Tom built their homestead with their bare hands, and Pandora has no intention of ever leaving it or being driven off.

Hester is therefore ready for any sort of excitement, so she’s thrilled when she finds an unconscious, injured man in the fields. Pandora brings him inside and tends to his wounds, which include a shattered leg.

The fellow’s name is Calhoun (Corin Nemec). Given the contents of the saddlebag Calhoun has been carrying with him, it doesn’t take long for Pandora to get the stranger to admit that he’s a bank robber who had a bloody falling-out with his associates.

Pandora thoroughly disapproves of Calhoun, but stops short of throwing him out the door – after all, he’s not going to get very far on a shattered leg. The bigger problem is that one of Calhoun’s late comrades has a brother called Bear John (Tom Hopper), who is as ruthless and vengeful as they come, with a small band of men who are pretty scary in their own right. What are they odds that they track down Calhoun to the Meadows farm?

Director Audrey Cummings and writer Richard Taylor make the most of their contained environments. PLACE OF BONES looks and sounds like a Western from pretty much any (color film) era, with suitably period dialogue and enough tense standoffs and shootouts to satisfy fans of settler/outlaw conflict.

There’s fun to be had watching the clashes between the iron-willed Pandora and the scoundrel Calhoun, who starts to realize he’s at a disadvantage.

Graham plays Pandora with enormous rectitude, determination, and a realistic sense of her own skills. Nemec keeps us wondering if Calhoun’s violent nature or his odd wistfulness will prevail. Hopper puts a deceptively soothing manner over Bear John’s chilling persona, and Robillard has an intriguing mixture of forcefulness and innocence.

There is a late-in-the-running revelation that seems intended to shift our perspective. However, we had no questions about anything related to this until it’s brought up, and it’s hard to see how either the action or the outcome would be different without it. It therefore winds up being more perplexing than impactful.

This aside, PLACE OF BONES has the Western staples of grit, personality, dirt, blood and bullets. It’s a decent one of what it is.

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