If the title of The Bone Man, based on a novel by Wolf Haas, didn't tip you off to the subject matter before you entered the theatre, the gorgeously creepy opening credits will. Vegetarians may find this movie objectionable. There's an awful lot of meat on display, some of it human, and some of it not quite dead yet.
De rigeur for the detective genre, we open with a murder, or what looks like one. Cut to our hero, Brenner, an ex-cop who quit to get away from "too much negative energy" and now spends his days as the world's most compassionate repo man. His boss sends him out into the sticks to deliver a final pre-repo warning to a deadbeat artist named Horvath. Brenner arrives at the inn where Horvath is known to be staying, but there's no sign of him. The inn's staff, an enigmatic, vaguely hostile lot, profess to know nothing of his whereabouts, despite the fact that his car is parked in the inn's lot and his suitcase turns up in their lost-and-found.
Eventually, the brusque head waitress pays off Horvath's debt, thinking it will get Brenner out of their hair. But Brenner's old instincts die hard, and he wants to know what's become of the artist, so he hangs around. Plus, he's developed a tentative crush on the inn's cook, the only person on the scene who seems relatively normal and unambiguously pleasant. He's drawn even further back into the detecting game by the innkeeper's son, a disagreeable wastrel who's incensed that his father appears to be embezzling the restaurant's profits. He tries to hire Brenner to find out where the money is going. And, because this story has its feet firmly planted in the pulp/noir tradition, the son is married to the friendly cook.
Despite their initial antipathy, Brenner and the innkeeper develop an edgy camaraderie as the days pass. The innkeeper is really quite a gruffly charming fellow, who, it turns out, butchers his own animals in the cellar. His inn is known far and wide for its delectable meat dishes, particularly chicken but also goulash. A few misunderstandings and missteps later, bodies are piling up, and, with all that slaughtering and carving and grinding paraphernalia right down there in the basement.... You see where this is headed, right?
Now, for as gruesome as it all sounds--and, indeed, is--what if I told you this is really a story about love? That even the worst of the bad guys is, to some extent, redeemed by it? That the most heinous crimes are motivated by the tenderest emotions? As the Gordian plot unknots itself across the screen, each twist and turn reveals as much warm human connection and compassion as it does horror.
Josef Hader perfectly embodies the straight-shooting Brenner. A Chandleresque tough-soft duality is at play in everything he does and says. His transposition from city streets to snowy countryside immediately calls to mind Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground. But where, in that movie, Robert Ryan's semi-psychotic cop is gentled and soothed by the people he interacts with once outside his normal environment, Brenner is the source of most of the gentling in The Bone Man. He's no saint, no confessor, no psychologist, yet he brings out the best in people, even while they're trying to kill him.
Director Wolfgang Murnberger stands back and lets the story tell itself, lets Hader's middle-aged, unremarkable-looking, and slightly melancholic Brenner go about his business of utterly captivating us. The result is a masterfully wry thriller, subtle in atmosphere and tone despite all its grisly, gristly excesses.
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