I come here not to review this film, but to denounce it as self-important trash. For those of you who are frontier ladies from the 1890s, let me translate to your dialect. (Forgive me if I err, I have learnt it only from Bone Tomahawk.)

It is. A burden. For a zoetrope to be so empty, yet vainglorious. It behoves, me. A simple. Yet feeling. Creature of God’s Earth. To come before you. And tell you. Why.

This is how the frontier ladies—1890s klaxon sound: sorry, lady —talk in Bone Tomahalk. For whatever reason, the Old West was overflowing with sentences, yet short of words. I can see why the scriptwriters made this creatice choice; halting speech pattern, less work. The viewer is not so lucky because despair is a kind of work, etcetera etcetera.

Let us begin.

The scene is the Old West. Cannibals abound, and they are mad because their burial grounds have been desecrated. A stranger arrives in the town of Bright Hope. Truly, this is a town that lives up to its name. A cowhand named Arthur O’Dwyer (the cop from Fargo, Season 2) has bought so many wall-hangings, throw pillows and dark-oak furnishings that his house has become the frontier’s first Anthropologie store. This is a useful backup income for Arthur, who has a sore leg and a wife (Florence Nightingale).

(Pay attention to Arthur’s leg, and to Mrs Arthur, for they are symbols. Symbols for the cucking and uncucking of America!)

But, inevitably, a town called Bright Hope can’t ride on its name forever. The official backup deputy, Chicory, doesn’t like the look of the stranger who just walked into town. Actually, what he says is, “It is the official opinion of the backup deputy that his manner was suspicious.” A little while later he repeats the same phrasing: “It is the official opinion of the backup deputy that my old man wenis is cold and my wife is dead”. This is some good dialogue because it gets across Chicory’s three main character points: that he is old, his wife is dead and, when temperatures fall, the blood in his old man wenis can’t circulate quickly enough to keep warm.

At this point, aeronautical pioneers the Wright Brothers make a fin de siècle skywriting cameo, etching vaporous words across a frontier sky:

Chicory’s signature phrase is ‘It is the official opinion of the backup deputy’. Memorise it for later. So far, it has been used in humorous contexts but, if you take the effort to remember it, perhaps there will be pathos to come. We are the best at flying and zeppelins suck!

Some viewers would say that this lacks subtlety. For me, it was the highlight of a dull opening reel.

The cannibals do some kidnapping because they are either hungry or out for revenge. They also steal some horses, so maybe the horses were in on the desecration, or taste good, or it was important for the plot that there were only four horses in town. Regardless, Bright Hope is now down Mrs Arthur, a spare deputy sheriff, and the no-good stranger.

Frankly, I’d have called it a day here because Arthur’s wife was surplus to requirements in Bright Hope. She was one of two prime suspects in the lavish overspending on fabrics in the O’Dwyer household. She talked like she’d been fed solely on a porridge made from pulped copies of Little House on the Prairie.

[At this point I obviously got bored of writing this review but, suffice to say, this film is shit beyond belief and, months after watching, I am still mad as hell about it. At the end, the backup deputy dies and then says “It is the official opinion of the backup deputy that we whupped those cannibals’ ass” or some garbage like that. Anyway, it’s a shame all of the main characters didn’t die during the opening sequence because it is the official opini…nah, fuck it, I can’t be bothered. Never watch this film.]