Queen of Bones (2023)

MOVIE 7 - 2025 Edition of 100 Horror Movies in 92 Days

All the ingredients are there: folk horror, gothic, and supernatural tags - all favorites of mine, solid casting including Martin Freeman, Julia Butters, and Jacob Tremblay, atmospheric PNW scenery. Insert some analogy about cooking or baking in which the end result is ... it just didn't quite come together. Maybe the tent was too cold that day?

Freeman plays Malcolm Brass, a luthier whose wife died (or did she???) giving birth to their twins Sam and Lily, who, as young teenagers, are beginning to question the stories their father tells about the circumstances of their mother's death, especially as Lily has started to experience psychic visions with the onset of puberty.

When a tree falls and kills their grandfather, they receive a trunk that belonged to their mother. Among her belongings, they find a witchy book, and secrets start to unravel about their mother's (and perhaps their own - especially Lily's) connection to the occult. The harder they try to find out more, the stricter their father becomes in a misguided attempt to keep them safe from it.

The plot was disjointed, to say the least, with too many ideas and too many threads being pulled but not fully explored or resolved. That said, it is worth a watch just for some of the atmospheric moments.

"After he takes us to the witch, I have to move booze." - Nothing interrupts your witch hunting like a little light Prohibition-era bootlegging.

Also, Taylor Schilling, ugh. What is it about her that I don't like?