Avis des critiques

Less a spaghetti Western than a pulled-pork horror movie, Bone Tomahawk is a terrifically effective piece of filmmaking whose ugliness, including not only death by scalping and vivisection, but also images of blinded, amputated, pregnant indigenous women, is deliberate and self-conscious.

The hook of Bone Tomahawk – Kurt Russell fighting cannibals in a frontier town – may suggest a comical romp, but novelist and first-time director S Craig Zahler's ambitions are far loftier than low stakes revivalist exploitation. It's an unpredictable, offbeat picture, which places the mythical notion of the West at the point of convergence between horror and the western.

Branded upon Bone Tomahawk's oater tropes is cluster-bungling of a decidedly Coen-esque stamp, as men's quirks and foibles, as well as the more mundane aspects of life on the trail, are milked for sly comedy. The effect is greatly assisted by the verbal wit of Zahler's screenplay, with one mannered zinger following fast on another.

With its careful widescreen compositions and painterly period-motivated lighting, Bone Tomahawk possesses a classical visual style that belies its pulpy genre mash-up logline of western-cum-cannibal horror film. There are no elaborate tracking shots in the feature debut of writer/director S. Craig Zahler. No Steadicam moves, no booming Technocranes, no extreme close-ups.

Even the final act is devoid of the kind of unhinged stylistic hysteria that can take over films that upend genre. You could even say that's what makes it so disturbing — the director's unflinching eye reveals both character and violence. Bone Tomahawk is terrifying and strange, to be sure, but it's the old-fashioned veneer that makes it beautiful.

[It's] a witty fusion of western, horror and comedy that gallops to its own beat. That rhythm is dictated entirely by the writer and director, S. Craig Zahler, a novelist and musician who flips genre conventions upside-down and cares more about character than body count. As a result, he has given us a horror movie whose monsters are withheld until the tail end of its 132 minutes, and an action movie whose longest section involves mostly walking and talking.

Zahler has a talent for action scenes that unfold counter to the beats one typically anticipates. The troglodytes descend on their victims with a frightening sense of rhythmic purpose, and the director has the shrewdness to keep them off the screen for most of the running time, leaving us with a gallery of veteran character actors who know just how to chew this well-worn material.

Winking explicitly to "The Searchers" with its ostensibly classical tale of four mismatched frontiersmen out to rescue abducted townsfolk from the clutches of a savage (and emphatically fictitious) native tribe, "Bone Tomahawk" may seem over-indulgent at 132 minutes, yet it's the wayward digressions of Zahler's script — navigated with palpable enjoyment by an expert, Kurt Russell-led ensemble — that are most treasurable in a film that commits wholeheartedly to its own curiosity value.