Bone Tomahawk

A drifter named Purvis stumbles into the frontier town of Bright Hope after disturbing something he shouldn't have in a canyon far from the road. That night, figures come out of the dark and take him — along with the deputy who was watching him and Samantha O'Dwyer, a woman who had been treating his wounds. The town wakes to blood and silence.

An old Native tracker tells Sheriff Hunt what took them: troglodytes. Not a tribe in any conventional sense — cave-dwelling cannibals, devolved, abandoned by every other people in the territory, something that was once human and no longer quite is. They live in the canyon. No one goes there.

Hunt puts together a rescue party of four: himself; Arthur O'Dwyer, Samantha's husband, riding with a badly broken leg he refuses to rest; Chicory, Hunt's old, gentle, garrulous backup deputy; and Brooder, a cold and precise gunslinger with a mean streak he doesn't bother hiding. They ride into the desert.

The journey takes most of the film — two men talking about their wives, an old man telling stories no one asked for, a fourth man keeping to himself. Brooder is killed by Comanche raiders on night watch. Three men continue.

They find the canyon. They find the caves. What's inside is not a rescue mission so much as a reckoning with what human beings can become when stripped of everything. The troglodytes have been keeping captives as livestock. What they do to them is precise and methodical and filmed without mercy.

Arthur, grievously wounded, gets Samantha out. She is alive. Hunt and Chicory survive. The canyon is left behind them, quiet again.