Rating: 3.5/5
This review contains spoilers !!
I really wasn't expecting to enjoy Marrowbone seeing as a lot of horror films within the past decade or so have been relatively lackluster with a few shining exceptions. Marrowbone itself follows a group of children, ranging from the eldest Jack (20?) to the youngest Sam (I want to say 7? 8?), hiding from the world after their mother's death until Jack turns 21 so the government can't separate them. Additionally, they're hiding from their father who is later revealed to be a serial killer/burglar in their old home which ALSO happens to have a ghost of some kind.
Overall the concept of the film is solid enough, I don't often see siblings in horror who actually act as though they're siblings. The four argue, cheat at board games, communally come to a decision at the dismay of at least one sibling, laugh, cry, forge their mother's handwriting, run around with a rifle with a single bullet in it, etc etc.
While all the siblings themselves are rather well-written and likable for the most part, there are two other characters who are vaguely important and serve more as devices to move the plot forward or reveal damning things about the Marrowbone's past. Jane and Tom, in all respects, are fine enough characters. They function as characters usually should in that both have their motivations for learning more about the Marrowbones- for Jane, out of love and for Tom, out of greed.
An issue here arises in that, aside from their VERY basic motivations, they are almost entirely devices whose sole purpose is to reveal parts of the plot to the audience as Jack cannot himself (which I will return to later). We get a majority of the Marrowbone's backstory from Tom's snooping or Jane's scene at the Skull Rock where she reads their ENTIRE history out to the audience. This, of course, leads me to the lackluster ending of Marrowbone.
To be entirely clear, I think this type of ending has its place in film, just not this one. Truth be told, just about everything that happens before the last 15 minutes of the movie is a hallucination of Jack's. It's revealed that all of Jack's siblings were killed in the attic after their father finally returned and Jack had sealed him away in said attic. The event caused him to develop DID (falsely named MPD in the film, but I supposed it's called that for period accuracy?) which is mostly depicted as Jack hallucinating his siblings still being alive and frantically taking their places during conversation. Personally, I really dislike this depiction of DID since it feels so hammy and has a clear misunderstanding of the disorder. It honestly feels like it's conflating schizospec and DID.
You can see this ending coming, by the way, if you know what to look for. Neither Tom nor Jane (past the scene where a window is shot at and it cuts to a few months later) see the rest of Jack's siblings for the rest of the film which, while subtle for people who do not often watch horror films, is very clearly signaling that something is clearly wrong.
Once again, this ending has its place in film, but it really just depends on the actual film. Movies like Shutter Island pull off endings like this- those I can only call "psychploitation"- perfectly as both their settings and narratives call for it and so it works incredibly well. With Marrowbone however, I find myself longing for an ending that actually leaned into the seemingly supernatural happenings in the house (before they're explained away with an "he was insane the whole time"-type ending). I almost feel like horror movies are trying to stray away from the events being explained through a supernatural/occult lens to appeal to a broader audience and almost "legitimize" itself among the other genres of film as horror has almost always been denounced as being trashy, cheap, and unable to provide any actual deeper narrative.
Aside from the ending, I think the rest of the film- the acting, the sound design, the set design, etc- is actually quite nice and sometimes even beautiful. If the ending had the balls to be weirder or more esoteric then the film would've been a 4.5 or 5, but due to the last 15 minutes alone souring the rest of the movie, it's a 3.5.