Dancer Faye (Roxy Bugler) lives an isolated existence in a remote cottage, where she is largely untroubled – at least, by other people. From the opening seconds, it’s clear that she has some unexplored trauma of some kind: even her dance moves and stretches quickly give way to tortured-seeming movements and gestures. Wild Bones (2022) charts the course of this trauma as it unfolds and develops, making several significant stops along the way; it is very much an experimental, and at times challenging, unreal kind of a journey.
One evening, Faye receives a phonecall from her estranged half-sister Alice (Mary Roubos), who informs her that their father’s estate is ready to be divided up. In other words, their father is officially dead, and they inherit his house: here’s the first clue that all is not as it should be, because Faye assumes that Alice has ‘spoken to dad’ somehow. In any case, this revelation prompts a reconnection of sorts between the two women. Alice comes to the house, accompanied by her partner? No, friend? – Gary (Tom Cray). It’s the depths of winter, and so – however unwittingly – Faye invites them both to stay awhile, making it clear that she is not comfortable with having guests. She remains distracted, awkward: the first conversation she has with Gary certainly has its painful moments. What does emerge, however, is the extent of the connection Faye had enjoyed with her late father. It still overshadows her life, and perhaps keeps her so detached from the rituals and habits of the day-to-day.
More to it than that? Certainly, her refusal to deal with the topic of the inheritance or any other family business suggests that she is more than just grieving her father’s loss; she is unable to hang onto memories reliably, and drifts into a dream state where those memories are painfully called into question. Alice tries to help her, encouraging her to deal with the new circumstances and to move on, but the (surprising) emergence of Gary as a new romantic partner for Faye seems to act as an additional trigger for her issues.
Given what has been said so far in this review, surely no one would be greatly surprised to find out that Wild Bones does not contain a neat, linear narrative arc, and is instead comprised of episodes and impressions – all of which hinge upon Faye and her dreams, preoccupations and anxieties. Sure, these episodes are connected by the same trauma, but play out quite differently: the whole film feels like an exercise in unwitting introspection. Faye herself is a kind of ghostly presence, hovering between the real and the unreal. For every conventional shot of her, there seems to be an echo – Faye painted in nightmarish colours, or refracted through different camera effects. As a means of bringing her internal feelings out into the external world, it looks very effective. Similarly, whilst presenting the on-screen nightmare has long held a particularly challenging appeal for filmmakers, when it’s done here, it’s done with nicely striking, visually rich scenes. Director Jack James is also very good at capturing that half-glimpsed, half-heard aspect of nightmares, where they blend with the waking world and blur with it, making you doubt what you have seen and/or heard. Other visual factors are just as compelling: Wild Bones is a lockdown baby, shot with a small cast in an isolated location, but even if there wasn’t an element of ‘needs must’ behind that, the wintry, remote location has a severe kind of glamour all its own. Conversely, the house interiors are warm and homely, with crackling fires to balance out the howling winds outside. It’s another sensual, often tactile film.
Perhaps the film’s clearest issue is just how audiences may define it: it doesn’t sit in any one genre, unless we plump for the very large catch-all category of ‘experimental film’. There are moments of horror, but they only punctuate the rest of the film; states of mind dominate over events; strange, hyperreal conversations provide only uncertain glimpses of a solid back-story. Like Malady, James’s first feature, Wild Bones broods over unconventional relationships, family losses and consequent anxieties. This is film as metaphysics, which can be a challenging, if intriguing watch.