The overwhelming number of slasher films on offer for horror fans these days means that every new iteration needs something unique or gimmicky to stand out – recent examples include Heart Eyes fusing it with romantic comedy, while Thanksgiving-themed kills around the titular holiday. 213 Bones offers a promising spin by focusing on a group of forensic anthropology students who are being taught to find information from skeletal remains. Their studies are interrupted when a killer begins to pick off their classmates, leaving them rushing to find the killer's identity before their time runs out.

Unfortunately, this potentially fun subject matter is buried within a film built almost entirely from well-worn out tropes. The film is oddly non-specific about its time period, but music cues and the lack of mobile phones suggest the nineties. The film itself certainly feels like a riff of slashers from that period, though specifically the also-ran knockoffs of big hitters rather than the heights of Scream. It attempts the self-awareness that film had but delivers it in the register of twenty-first-century horror comedies like Cabin in the Woods, which jars with the nineties/early noughties aesthetic as well as generating as many laughs as a funeral. Even the opening scene with a horny couple getting randomly slaughtered feels ripped from a bad eighties horror with even clunkier dialogue.

As a first-time feature with a clearly limited budget, the amount of effort involved in putting the film together is evident. However, enthusiasm doesn't translate to being engaging, with the film having a glossy sheen that masks its emptiness. Like its kills, the film feels generic and clean-cut with no tension or threat being built up as characters drift from scene to scene, running down the clock as the characters thin out, leading to an unsatisfying killer reveal. Their motive is completely unconnected to the characters, by the killer's own admission, and feels like it's from a completely different film from the one we've been watching.

High-concept slashers can be fun if the filmmakers commit to it, regardless of how well it is executed, but 213 Bones seems to actively resist pursuing originality. Both the plot and the characters feel procedural, going through the motions that even the most casual horror watcher will have seen before. I've never watched Bones, the popular crime show also based around forensic anthropology, but after watching this, I feel like watching a season of it would have been a more entertaining use of my time.

213 Bones had its UK premiere at FrightFest 2025 on 24 August