Interview: Mercedes Bryce Morgan on ‘Bone Lake’
The erotic thriller has always been a genre of contradictions. Sleek on the surface, chaotic underneath. Every glance is a gamble. Every promise has teeth. With Bone Lake, director Mercedes Bryce Morgan takes those contradictions and flips them on their head, delivering a truly subversive film in the process.
Bone Lake centers on Sage and Diego, a couple whose romantic vacation at a secluded lakeside estate is upended when they are forced to share the mansion with a mysterious and attractive couple, Will and Cin. As the night progresses, their dream getaway spirals into a nightmarish maze of sex, lies, and manipulation, bringing terrifying secrets to light and triggering a bloody battle for survival.
When we first meet them, Sage and Diego are at a crossroads in their relationship. Diego has just quit his job to pursue his dream of being a writer, leaving Sage to be the only provider in their household. Frustrated both sexually and emotionally by their relationship, Sage already has one foot out the door, while Diego remains oblivious, secretly coming up with a plan to propose during their vacation. Before the first drop of blood (aside from the film’s gnarly opening), the film gives them space to unravel, allowing the audience to feel the distance between them in the way Sage moves, in the way Diego tries not to notice.
“The root of all this violence is because of what they’re going through in their relationships,” says Bryce Morgan. “Giving the time to build that up makes you really care, so when the chaos hits, you’re going, ‘oh no, these characters we actually care about — they might not be okay.’” It’s a statement that reflects her larger motive as a filmmaker: to make thrillers that are not just about the violence itself, but about what the violence reveals.
In the past few years, the erotic thriller has started to creep back into the mainstream, after nearly two decades of cultural puritanism that desperately tried to push sex out of Hollywood films. For Bryce Morgan, that swing feels inevitable. “It’s like politics. We swing,” she laughs. “No sex. Okay, sex is back. People have been so pushed away from that for so long that they’re ready for us to be in that era again.”
Much of the sex and nudity in erotic thrillers feels entirely gratuitous. They technically add nothing to the plot but instead are designed to titillate the (mostly male) audience with extended sequences of female nudity (with next to no male nudity). Bone Lake, however, refuses the one-sided, male-dominated gaze that defined much of the genre in the ’80s and ’90s, instead giving equal opportunity screentime to both the men and women of the film. “If you’re going to have one gender naked, you need to have all genders naked,” says Bryce Morgan. “It’s either all or nothing, because I want to balance out that gaze. Sex is part of the human existence. Through movies, we examine that. So why not make it a part of it?”
Despite that, the film never treats sex as a sideshow. It sits inside every exchange. In the glances that linger, in the pauses that last a beat too long. What starts as connection becomes competition, a quiet push and pull for control. Desire hums underneath the violence, shaping it, feeding it, refusing to disappear even when it should.
What makes Bone Lake feel dangerous isn’t just the violence, however. It’s that every character is fighting for something beyond survival. “People always have a reason why they’re doing things,” says Morgan. “It’s either someone wants to be loved, or someone wants to be feared, or they’re insecure about something. That’s the interesting part.”
That insistence on motive drives the performances of the film’s leads, all who deliver phenomenal performances. Alex Roe’s Will is a perfect example. He enters the film bathed in warm light, charming, frat-boy loose. But Morgan wanted that charm to rot from the inside out. “I talked with Alex the same way I did with the DP,” she says. “First you’re this fun-loving guy, then let’s get weirder, more ridiculous. Empowering him to go for it.”
Maddie Hasson and Marco Pigossi, as Sage and Diego, play on a quieter but no less unsettling wavelength. Morgan credits their trust in each other as the reason their relationship feels lived-in. “They were both so supportive of each other,” she says. “And that comfort allowed them to make real choices.”
Even at its most brutal, Bone Lake refuses to play things straight. There’s a pulse of queerness running through it, in the way the men size each other up, in the strange tenderness that flickers between the women. Nothing is explicit, but the charge is there, humming under every scene. Morgan doesn’t frame it as statement or shock, it’s simply part of how desire moves in her world, fluid and unpredictable. “I think probably because I’m queer, I can’t help but have a queer lens,” she says. “Queer has a very strong connection with camp, and because I came from that culture, grew up watching movies like that, it felt so much more fun to let the film have that funny, self-aware quality. There’s a straight version of this movie, but that wasn’t us.”
That decision gives the film a strange electricity that practically bursts off the screen. Where another director might have leaned into slick fatalism, Morgan embraces absurdity; the way people in real life can be both terrifying and ridiculous in the same moment. Bone Lake is never ironic, but it is knowing, aware of the line between desire and parody, willing to teeter on that edge.
Morgan’s work — from Fixation to Spoonful of Sugar — has always circled the same territory: the human urge to test limits, to push ourselves into discomfort just to see what’s there. Bone Lake feels like her clearest statement of that instinct. “I like things that make me feel uncomfortable, but also I want to have fun with it,” she says. “Anything that pushes extremes, that explores the human psyche of why people do bad things — but where we can also have a blast watching it happen — that’s what excites me.”
BONE LAKE is now playing in theaters.