In April, S. Craig Zahler stepped onto a Toronto soundstage to begin shooting The Bookie and the Bruiser, a period mafia thriller starring Vince Vaughn and Theo James. It is his first film behind the camera since 2018’s Dragged Across Concrete – an eight-year absence that makes the timing ripe for a reckoning with the work that started it all. In 2015, Zahler wrote and directed Bone Tomahawk, a cannibal western that cost $1.8 million, grossed $475,846 domestically, and proceeded to haunt the cultural conversation for the next decade. It holds a 93 per cent critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It spawned no sequel, no franchise, no universe. It simply refused to leave.
The Slow Burn That Broke the mould
The premise is disarmingly simple. Sheriff Franklin Hunt (Kurt Russell) leads three men – a narcissistic gunslinger (Matthew Fox), a talkative deputy (Richard Jenkins), and an injured rancher whose wife has been taken (Patrick Wilson) – into the desert to rescue settlers kidnapped by a tribe of cave-dwelling cannibals. The first hour unfolds with the patient cadence of a John Ford picture: laconic dialogue, sun-scorched landscapes, and the sort of character business that lets you feel the weight of dust on skin. Zahler was not interested in hurry. “I wanted to capture these performances and present them to the audience in as unfiltered a way as possible,” he told Filmmaker Magazine in 2015. The editing, he explained, was almost entirely motivated by the actors’ eye-lines rather than the editor’s instinct – a quiet act of defiance against the jump-cut rhythm of contemporary cinema.
That patience is the film’s secret weapon. By the time the Troglodytes strike, you have spent enough time with these men that their terror registers not as spectacle but as violation. The final thirty-five minutes descend into territory Zahler himself admits he had never seen in a western: “I don’t know of movies like that, certainly not westerns. I’ve never seen a western that did that,” Kurt Russell told Collider during the press cycle. He was not exaggerating.
A Novelistic Eye in a Genre of Archetypes
Zahler arrived at filmmaking through an unusual route. Before Bone Tomahawk, he had published two western novels – A Congregation of Jackals and Wraiths of the Broken Land – and sold or optioned over twenty screenplays, none of which had been produced. He composed death metal albums. He worked as a catering chef. The scripts gathered dust in what he calls “purgatory.” “Screenplays are blueprints for movies, and even though I’ve put my novelist prose in those screenplays, if they’re not made into movies, they’re incomplete,” he told Daily Dead in 2015. Bone Tomahawk was conceived as something he could control – a low-budget indie horror film he intended to fund on his credit card. His manager Dallas Sonnier and his agent persuaded him to write a western instead, reasoning that the genre could attract a better cast and, with it, proper financing.
What emerged was something closer to a novel than a genre exercise. The dialogue crackles with literary specificity: Brooder muses that “people are like plants, they grow toward the light” between dispatching outlaws; Chicory rambles about the ethics of killing horses. These are not the clipped quips of a studio western. They are the digressions of men who talk to fill the silence of an indifferent landscape. As Zahler told The Ringer in 2019, “When you’re building out all of these different situations and then elaborating on those elaborations, you get a sense of all these pre-existing relationships and complex characters. As much conversation has been devoted to the violent aspects of my pictures, all of that stuff is at least as important, if not more important.”
Violence as Anthropology, Not Exhibition
Bone Tomahawk‘s reputation rests on a single scene – the bisection of a captive – that has seared itself into the memory of anyone who has witnessed it. But to reduce the film to that moment is to miss its method. Zahler’s violence is never casual; it is architectural. The Troglodytes’ rituals – scalping, dismemberment, forced cannibalism – are presented with the same unflinching steadiness as the trek that precedes them. There are no rapid cuts to soften the blow, no score to tell you how to feel. “The main thing is that it was a very dry presentation of the violence in the same way as Cannibal Holocaust,” Zahler told Daily Dead. “I kept the style consistent with the hideous violence.”
This refusal to aestheticise cruelty is what separates Bone Tomahawk from the torture-porn tag it sometimes receives. The violence serves a thematic purpose: it mirrors the settlers’ own colonial savagery, exposing the thin membrane between “civilisation” and the barbarism it claims to displace. The Troglodytes, though monstrous, are not aliens – they are the frontier’s suppressed mirror image. Russell’s sheriff articulates it plainly: “The only difference between us and them is we ain’t eat our dead.”
Richard Jenkins and the Heart of the Thing
For all Russell’s grizzled authority – channelling his Tombstone swagger with weathered pathos – the film’s emotional centre belongs to Richard Jenkins as Deputy Chicory. His rambling monologues about lost love and small-town loneliness provide the bruised warmth against which the horror registers. “I don’t want to die alone,” he whispers in the Troglodytes’ lair, and the line lands as one of the most quietly devastating in 21st-century genre cinema. Jenkins, a two-time Academy Award nominee, brings a dignity to the role that elevates it from sidekick to co-lead. Fox’s Brooder, meanwhile, subverts the heroic gunslinger archetype: a narcissist who quotes poetry between kills, his eloquence masking moral rot.
The ensemble – completed by Patrick Wilson’s Arthur O’Dwyer, dragging a gangrenous leg through the desert in an extended metaphor for futile masculine pride – operates as a study in frontier masculinity under extremity. Each man represents a different answer to the question of what a man owes to others when survival is no longer guaranteed.
Cult Status and the Long Afterlife
Upon release, Bone Tomahawk polarised. Some critics dismissed it as misanthropic endurance cinema. Others hailed a masterpiece. Over the ensuing decade, the consensus has hardened firmly in its favour. A SteelBook Blu-ray arrived in November 2023 via RLJE Films – still no 4K restoration, a sore point for collectors – and the film streams on Disney Plus, Hulu, Shudder, and AMC Plus. Its influence can be traced through Robert Eggers’s The Northman and David Lowery’s The Green Knight, both of which borrow its strategy of embedding genre extremity within a literary, almost ritualistic pacing.
More importantly, Bone Tomahawk established the template for Zahler’s subsequent work: Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017) and Dragged Across Concrete (2018) both deploy his signature blend of methodical build-up, morally compromised protagonists, and sudden, shocking violence. None of the three match Bone Tomahawk‘s thematic coherence, but each confirms a filmmaker who has never once compromised his vision for commercial palatability. “Certainly I’m not making movies and writing and doing all these things to become popular or for people to like me,” Zahler told The Ringer. “I hope people enjoy them, but I’m not going to make different creative choices so that more of them do.”
What Comes Next
The Bookie and the Bruiser, set in late-1950s New York, follows two World War II veterans – one Jewish, one Italian-American – who form an illicit gambling operation and find themselves caught between the Mafia and the Irish mob. It reunites Zahler with Vince Vaughn for the third time and introduces Theo James in a role originally intended for Adrien Brody before his Oscar campaign intervened. Fred Melamed and Patrick Schwarzenegger have also joined the cast. Cinematographer Benji Bakshi, who has lensed all four of Zahler’s films (and recently worked on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds), is on board. Principal photography began in Toronto on 7 April under the working title Christmas Mysteries, with an expected wrap by late May. Another Zahler script, Empire City, a hostage thriller starring Hayley Atwell and Gerard Butler, is also expected to shoot this year.
The return raises an intriguing question: in an era of algorithmically optimised content, does a filmmaker who refuses to court popularity still have a place? Bone Tomahawk‘s answer – a $1.8 million film that outlasted blockbusters through sheer, stubborn conviction – suggests the question answers itself. The frontier, it turns out, still belongs to those willing to walk into the dark without guarantees.
Bone Tomahawk is streaming on Disney Plus, Hulu, and Shudder in the UK. For a closer look at Zahler’s debut, see our original review. The Bookie and the Bruiser is expected in 2027. Read more in our genre alchemy feature.
