The Bone Snatcher
Director: Jason Wulfsohn
Writer: Malcolm Kohll, Gordon Render
Cast: Scott Bairstow, Rachel Shelley, Warrick Grier, Patrick Shai, Andre Weideman, Adrienne Pearce, Patrick Lyster
Seen on: 20.12.2025

Plot:
In a mining operation in the Namib desert, workers start disappearing. Dr. Zack Straker
(Scott Bairstow) is supposed to investigate together with a small team, Mikki (Rachel
Shelley), Karl (Warrick Grier), Titus (Patrick Shai), Kurt (Andre Weidemann) and their driver
Magda (Adrienne Pearce). Once they get to the latest geologists who went missing, all they
find is the bones of two of the three, neatly freed from any flesh. The third body is missing,
and that’s only where the weirdness starts.

The Bone Snatcher is a pretty damn bad film. The idea is not that bad, but everything else is
somewhere between subpar and downright atrocious. It is also an incredibly white film for a
film set in Namibia.

The Bone Snatcher might have worked as a short film, but even at its rather moderate
runtime of 96 minutes, it feels pretty thin. Though one could have used the runtime to flesh
out (no pun intended) the characters involved, as they all are pretty one-note and don’t have
nothing much to say. The only one who felt like more than just a cardboard cut-out was
Magda, and she is a pretty minor character in the film, so I think credit needs to go to Pearce
for that, and not really to the script.

When they do have things to say, it is sometimes surprisingly difficult to understand, and I
don’t think my TV was to blame. Though it may be that there is a part of my brain that was trying to protect me from the often clunky dialogue.

The film has one mystical Black dude sitting in the desert, and one Black member of the team who are both used to share this knowledge about local folklore (although, if I remember correctly, Titus is not actually from the area). Arguably that’s because the locals know better than to get involved but it’s a racist choice either way.

Even though I thought that the idea this builds on (maybe an actual African legend, I don’t know) is really pretty good, the execution really is so poor that it’s best if we collectively forget that this film exists and nobody else dives into it like I did.

Summarizing: just plain bad, and not in a particularly funny way either.