The last few days have involved some rather high brow cinema, so today seemed like a good chance to prove that I don’t only watch 5 ½ hour Russian documentaries and heart throbbing dramas from auteurs. Today I reached into my 2025 back log and pulled out an aggressively sexual, sleezy horror film Bone Lake.

Starring Maddie Hasson (who despite what I originally thought is not Florence Pugh’s alias) and Marco Pigossi as Sage and Diego a couple whose relationship is on the precipice of change as Diego leaves his job teaching to work on a novel full time. They escape to a remote mansion on the titular Bone Lake only to have their weekend interrupted when it Will (Alex Roe) and Cin (Andra Nechita) show up as well having apparently rented the same place.

Mercedes Bryce Morgan directs the film by bringing a decent amount of style from the directorial chair for the journeywoman director. Her experience with directing music videos shows as much of the style is reminiscent of that medium. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of her direction, however, is that she kept her vision untouched resulting in a film that is slightly gorier and substantially sexier than most films in this genre made today.

A significant amount of digital ink has been spilled in the last handful of years on gen Z’s disinterest in sex in movies. While I understand and respect the desire for more platonic stories in film, there is something to be said about enjoying some gratuitously horny cinema. Sex is a part of humanity worth capturing, and a titillating one at that. Bryce Morgan does not shy away from this piece of humanity and understands its inherent entertainment value.

While Bone Lake won’t be brought up in the coming months as the awards conversation takes over Hollywood, it still fills a niche that has been increasingly shrinking in the current cinematic landscape. Bryce Morgan created a film that was first and foremost fun entertainment without resorting to endless flatly lit wide shots on a green screen. When so much of what makes it to theaters is $300 million blockbusters shot so safely that they risk nothing and $5 million arthouse gems (which don’t get me wrong I love), Bone Lake proves that pure entertainment does not have to be so safe it might as well be hermetically sealed.