Summary:
A soon-to-be stepmother takes her fiancé’s children to a remote lodge to get to know them, but soon unusual events start to plague them.
My Thoughts:
This was one of my most anticipated films of the year, and while I wouldn’t call “The Lodge” a disappointment, it certainly wasn’t what I was expecting.
I’m a huge horror fan, and I was blown away by Severin Fiala and Veronikka Franz’s first (narrative) film: “Goodnight Mommy”, which came out six years ago. The trailers for “The Lodge” made it look like a straight up horror movie on par with “Hereditary”; reviewers were even quoted in said trailers, saying that “The next great horror film is here.”
I’m going to refute that claim. This is not a great horror movie; it’s a very competent but somewhat frustrating thriller. I don’t think this movie is very scary, but I do think the things that happen in the third act are undeniably horrific, inventive, and unnerving. It’s a disturbing thriller that takes a very long time to get to the disturbing moments, and that’s part of the reason I found this film to be a bit frustrating. I found “The Lodge” was also a little bit heavy-handed with its foreshadowing, so it became easily predictable for those that are used to the tropey twists of the genre.
At the same time, the story that this movie told was one that I thought was compelling, and towards the end, when the horrific elements start to ramp up, it really grabbed my attention; the problem was that it took about twenty minutes too long to get there, and the film isn’t very long in the first place. I liked the story “The Lodge” tells, but the lack of payoff for the first two-thirds of the film really tests the patience of the viewer, and it’s clear that this film takes heavy inspiration from recent horror greats (“Hereditary” in particular- there’s a lot of interior miniature shots).
“Repent… Repent your sins.”
Richard (Richard Armitage, “Oceans Eight”) and Laura (Alicia Silverstone, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”) are a married couple going through a divorce after Richard had an affair with Grace (Riley Keough, “Under the Silver Lake”). Richard and Laura’s children, Aidan (Jaeden Martell, “Knives Out”) and Mia (Lia McHugh, “Hot Summer Nights”) decide they hate Grace before they get to know her, but as Grace and Richard are soon to be married, Grace wants to form a good relationship with the children, and sets out to have a weekend alone with them in an isolated lodge. Things quickly start to get weird.
It’s hard to talk about this movie without revealing some spoilers almost immediately, so I have to throw up a MINOR SPOILER WARNING now, and then I’ll throw up a more major spoiler warning towards the end of the review.
MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW
So, the reason that Aidan and Mia hate Grace from the get-go is because after their mother finds out about the affair, she blows her brains out in their kitchen, and their father seems less-than-upset about the way things played out. The film flashes forward a number of months, and Richard announces that he and Grace will get married, and the kids are, justifiably, infuriated. Aidan then brings up that Grace is a psycho who was the only surviving member of a cult whose members committed mass suicide, and then Aidan and Mia do a bit of research on their Dad’s computer (he is an author who met Grace as he was doing research for his book), and find out all they need to know about Grace. Then, they head to the lodge. More spoilers will follow below, but let’s discuss this first.
One of the first awkward moments came during the scene where Laura blows her brains out; we’re just watching Laura move things around in her house and then she sits down at her table and begins fishing around in her purse. At that moment, I thought to myself: there is no other reason for this scene to be in the movie unless she’s about to kill herself. Ten seconds later, she did just that. It felt as if the film had just tipped its hand a bit too early, letting me know too many details that helped me to predict exactly what was going to happen. The part where the kids started to research Grace felt a little off to me too. It felt as if the movie was just dropping a bunch of exposition on a way that was only slightly better than a talking head just spouting important information; it felt as if the scene was cheaply inserted into the movie. After the family gets to the house, the first days are normal, but then Richard leaves because he has to work (why he can’t work remotely from the cabin is beyond me- he’s an author- all he needs is internet connection and a word processor). After Richard leaves, things start to get weird.
MAJOR SPOILERS ABOUT TWISTS FOLLOW
After Richard leaves, Grace tries her best to make a connection with the kids, but they seem incredibly cold. Then, after dinner one night, Aidan gives Grace a mug of tea, almost as if he is trying to bridge the gap between them. The trio watches a movie (John Carpenter’s “The Thing”). As they are watching the film, Mia complains about how cold it is, so Aidan brings in a gas heater and starts it up. Graces asks if it’s safe to run the heater indoors and Aidan assures her that it is. The next morning, when Grace wakes up, a ton of things are missing from the house: her dog, food, clothes, and most importantly, her pills, which, we’re led to believe, are some kind of anti-psychotic. Things get weirder and weirder as the time progresses: clocks seem to skip dates, she starts hearing voices, and it seems impossible for her to leave the lodge. Aidan then suggests that perhaps they died and are caught in purgatory.
Again, the biggest problem is that every single detail is so heavily foreshadowed that the twists that come at the end of this film don’t feel like twists at all; it’s like you’re in a dark tunnel and all of the sudden you see a light at the end of that tunnel and a whistle blows- you don’t need to wait until the train is ten feet from you to know it’s a train, the signs are already there. When Aidan gets the tea for Grace, I thought to myself, “That’s out of character.” When the kids brought the heater out into the living room, I immediately thought, “Oh, this can’t be good, they’re going to suffocate.” But then, when Aidan says that they might be stuck in purgatory, I immediately thought, “Oh, no. The kids just are f*cking with Grace.” And indeed, that’s more or less what is happening. The film gives away its hand about a half hour too early, but then the final scenes do have a few good moments, although, still, it is predictable.
MAJOR SPOILERS ABOUT ENDING
In the end, an increasingly psychotic Grace convinces herself that they are indeed in purgatory and that they cannot die. Grace then kills Richard when he comes to pick them up, and the film ends with the whole family sitting around a dinner table (Richard, slumped over dead), Grace preparing to shoot the other children to prove that they can’t die.
That ending is awesome. The kids get what they deserve for messing with Grace; it’s like they dug their own graves. It’s also a pretty messed up way to end the movie, with an implied triple-murder suicide that involves a sixteen-year-old boy and a pre-teen girl. If we’d arrived at this ending sooner, and without revealing half the secrets through heavy-handedness, this ending would’ve been a killer way to round off the film. As it is, this movie is fine.
Verdict:
I wish I could report that I loved this film as much as “Goodnight Mommy”, but unfortunately I didn’t. It’s not a bad movie; it looks great throughout, there are moments just dripping with creepy atmosphere, and the acting from pretty much everyone is relatively good. The film just tips its hand too early and too often, so much so that we already know the twists before they come, and that sort of spoils the fun of the movie.
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