BONES (2025)” – A Pulse-Pounding Archaeological Horror That Digs Up More Than the Past
BONES is 2025’s most surprising genre mash-up, fusing prestige archaeology drama with nerve-shredding supernatural horror. Directed by Nia DaCosta (Candyman, The Marvels), the film follows an elite excavation team that unearths a cursed necropolis beneath the sands of northern Sudan—only to discover some relics are better left buried.
Dr. Amara Lewis (Lupita Nyong’o), a brilliant but disgraced paleo-anthropologist, accepts one last chance at redemption when billionaire tech mogul Victor Rhine (Michael Fassbender) bankrolls her dig. Rhine’s obsession? Recovering the fabled “Cartilage Codex,” a rumored bone scroll said to contain prehistoric knowledge of life—and death. Joined by cultural liaison Musa Idris (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and combat medic-turned-field nurse Harper Quinn (Florence Pugh), the team descends into a labyrinth of limestone catacombs untouched for 40,000 years.
At first, the discoveries are awe-inspiring: impeccably preserved hominin skeletons with elongated skulls and unknown runic carvings. Then the anomalies begin. Fossils bleed. Lidar scanners go haywire. Team members suffer waking hallucinations of ancient hunts, their bones briefly luminous beneath their skin. DaCosta ratchets tension slowly, relying on practical effects and unsettling sound design—cracking joints, distant drums—to suggest an intelligence moving beneath the dig site.
Halfway through, the film shifts from eerie mystery to full survival horror when Rhine reads a passage from the Codex aloud, awakening a primordial hive-mind that can manipulate calcium. Bones rip free of sediment, assembling into towering ossified guardians. Traps snap limbs at impossible angles, only for the skeletons to re-form using their victims’ remains. Amara realizes the necropolis is less a tomb than an incubator: an evolutionary off-shoot that fed on early humans and is now hungry again.
While the set-pieces are visceral—an underground river of marrow, a spiraling staircase built from spines—the true power of BONES lies in its moral unease. Nyong’o anchors the film with a performance equal parts scientific wonder and mounting guilt, as Amara confronts the colonial echoes of treasure hunting. Fassbender’s Rhine, meanwhile, embodies modern hubris, eager to patent immortality even as his body splinters.
Shot with ochre-hued cinematography and scored by Hildur Guðnadóttir’s bone-rattling strings, BONES asks a chilling question: if humanity’s evolutionary cousins left us a message, should we ever dare to read it? By the final, haunting tableau—an ossuary skyline lit by desert dawn—the answer feels carved into our own trembling ribs.
