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In Queen of Bones, director Robert Budreau (known for the stylish biopics Born to Be Blue and Stockholm) trades jazz clubs and hostage crises for the moss-draped melancholy of 1930s Oregon. Here, the trees whisper old secrets, the light never quite reaches the ground, and a grieving family hides from a past soaked in both trauma and the occult. It’s fertile ground for horror, and the film reaches eagerly for the soil—but rarely digs deep enough to reap anything richer than mood.
Marketed as a “folk horror” tale and ominously prefaced with “Folktales of the Great Depression…,” Queen of Bones flirts with a dozen evocative themes—religious repression, familial rot, the mythic force of nature—but commits fully to none. The result is a handsomely shot but dramatically tepid rural gothic, where even the supernatural feels strangely uninspired.
A Familiar Haunting
Set in 1931, Queen of Bones follows 14-year-old twins Lily (Julia Butters) and Sam (Jacob Tremblay), who live in isolation under the grim rule of their father Malcolm Brass (Martin Freeman), a widower whose grief curdles into tyranny. Brass is the archetype of backwoods patriarchy: stern, stoic, and determined to keep his children uneducated, unquestioning, and under his thumb. “Your mother died so you could live,” he reminds them grimly, a refrain that grows more suspicious with every repetition.
Things begin to shift when a trunk arrives—relics from the children’s deceased maternal grandfather, including a strange, hand-written book of Icelandic spells. The arrival of this book, alongside the discovery of rune-like carvings in the surrounding forest, serves as the film’s supernatural trigger, but instead of unlocking dread, it opens a door to the familiar: the oppressed child discovering power, the buried truth struggling to surface.
The story that follows divides itself into portentously titled chapters (“It Began With Blood,” “Domain of Darkness”), a structural affectation that suggests epic stakes but delivers mostly mild discomfort. What ought to be a slow-burning, anxiety-laced tale of generational trauma and pagan resurgence turns out to be a film more interested in gesture than revelation. The occult is never more than a faint whiff, the horror more implied than embodied.
Siblings in Shadows
Tremblay and Butters, two of the most acclaimed young actors working today, deliver competent, occasionally stirring performances. Butters especially shines when Lily begins to assert herself, trading her father’s dour religion for the latent power whispered to her through the spellbook. Her transformation, however, is stifled by a screenplay that treats character evolution more as an obligation than a journey.
Sam, meanwhile, remains curiously underdeveloped. His desire to escape his father’s tyranny is clear from the outset, but his emotional arc barely registers. As a result, the dynamic between the siblings—central to the film’s emotional heart—feels thinner than it should, a bond sketched but never shaded in. Their shared resistance to the suffocating forces around them flickers, but rarely flares.
Freeman, best known for roles that lean into reserved gentility, is miscast here. His Malcolm lacks menace; he is neither chilling enough to terrify nor complex enough to understand. Taylor Schilling’s turn as Ida May, the would-be stepmother and local busybody, similarly flounders. Her motivations are murky, her impact negligible. The film populates its margins with intriguing figures—Patricia Phillips as the enraged maternal grandmother, for example—but none are given the space to resonate.
Aesthetic Intentions, Uneven Results
Visually, Queen of Bones aims for a subdued period realism. Shot in a near-square aspect ratio by cinematographer Andre Pienaar and painted in washed-out browns and greys, the film evokes a kind of Depression-era stillness that occasionally borders on lifelessness. The Oregon wilderness, which should throb with mystery and menace, is rendered more as backdrop than character. Budreau’s control of tone is exacting, but not evocative.
The film’s production design and costuming get the job done without ever surprising. The musical score by West Dylan Thordson (known for his work on Split and Mindhunter) carries an eerie elegance, but the tension it conjures is rarely matched by what’s on screen.
There’s an atmosphere, yes—but atmosphere alone cannot substitute for stakes. And this is Queen of Bones’ greatest sin: it forgets to scare. Whether emotionally, psychologically, or viscerally, the film never quite provokes. Even its most disturbing suggestions—witchcraft, infanticide, inherited power—are handled with such restraint that they lose their bite.
Not Quite a Folk Horror
One might assume from the “folk horror” label—invoked in press materials and reinforced by comparisons to Carrie and Flowers in the Attic—that Queen of Bones would tap into the rich, subversive traditions of that genre: the collision of old beliefs and new anxieties, the communal fear of what lies just beyond the clearing. But Budreau’s film lacks the moral unease, the visceral confrontations, and the mythic energy that defines great folk horror. It hints at subversion but retreats into the comfort of soft melodrama.
Where The Witch (2015) or Midsommar (2019) pushed their protagonists to the edge of transformation and madness, Queen of Bones merely nudges Lily toward self-actualization before pulling back. Her emerging powers—telekinetic, symbolic, possibly inherited from her mother’s pagan past—are never fully explored. A showdown looms, but never lands.
In its final scenes, the film suggests a reclaiming of power, a rejection of patriarchal control, and a triumph of bloodline over dogma. But the victory feels unearned. There is too little struggle, too little cost. What could have been a searing coming-of-age through fire and folklore is instead a quiet drift into a kind of proto-feminist after-school special.
A Modest Spell, Lightly Cast
In the end, Queen of Bones is not a bad film—merely a forgettable one. It is competently made, intermittently engaging, and earnest in its intentions. But it is also slight, repetitive, and afraid to truly disturb. For a story steeped in the symbols of old-world witchcraft, it casts a surprisingly modest spell.
Younger audiences or those less steeped in the genre’s conventions may find comfort in its soft melancholy and its gentle indictment of authoritarian faith. But for horror aficionados or anyone expecting a film that lives up to its Gothic and supernatural promises, Queen of Bones will feel more like a ghost story that never quite materializes.
Verdict: Queen of Bones has the bones of a haunting folk tale, but lacks the flesh and fire to make it truly memorable. A missed opportunity, cloaked in aesthetic but bereft of impact.
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