You don’t need to be a fright flick aficionado to enjoy this smart and witty tale of a romantic weekend break going gruesomely wrong

It is certainly unusual to see in closeup an arrow fired into a naked scrotum before the title of a film has even been shown, but this is that rare film. The scrotum in question belongs to a man fleeing unclothed through the woods from an unseen assailant, together with an equally naked female companion who also comes swiftly to a sticky end. As opening salvoes go, it hits the spot, as it were.

Then the film proper begins. A couple arrive at a bougie rental home only to find themselves facing the ultimate millennial nightmare: you’ve shelled out your hand-earned cash on a place for the weekend but find another couple have also booked it. This is the problem of listings on multiple platforms! Or is something more sinister going on? (If the ballsack shish kebab didn’t tip you off, another clue lies in the fact that the movie is called Bone Lake, not Airbnb Clash.) Imagine the social boundary-pushing of recent horror Speak No Evil with characters from White Lotus season 2 using the set-up from Barbarian, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of how much fun this will all prove to be.

Remix of old and new material from TV series includes tremendous battle sequences but there’s an awful lot of lore for new viewers to catch up with

Here’s an unusual proposition: a film that opens with a kind of super-edit, cutting together chunks culled from many hours’ worth of plot and spectacle from the Jujutsu Kaisen TV series, which is then followed by some all-new episodes of the TV series; playing together in full as a movie, in the cinema. Is it a movie borrowing bits from a TV show? A TV show dressed up as a movie? Does it matter? It certainly doesn’t, if all you need is spectacular and imaginatively staged battle sequences – though for non-initiates, it’s difficult to see it adding up to much more than that.

One thing that would be very helpful – and is regrettably lacking – is a Star Wars-style scroll plainly laying out the backstory in simple terms for unfamiliar viewers. Sure, the TV show compilation does a bit of that, but it also feels like trying to download a thousand years of lore into your head, while simultaneously having your mind boggled by wild visions of conflict in the underworld. A bit more context for the long-running struggle between good and evil, involving sorcerers and “curses” (which seems to mean something closer to “demon” here), would be of great help to the normies over here.