The Lodge
Psychological horror is my favorite subgenre of horror. I love to experience a film that gets anxiety, stress and trauma right, whether it delves into violence or not; I prefer a slow-burn experience in dread. A big part of why the best ones in this subgenre- I’m thinking “The Shining,” “The Witch,” “Hereditary” and the original “Cat People”- work is our ability to empathize with the characters, regardless of how the story plays out for them. We may disagree with their choices, at times, but we still feel like we can follow them through to where those choices lead them.
This brings me to “The Lodge,” which sets up a promising premise for psychological horror; sadly, the film we end up with squanders it, although I will not share how. Needless to say, it comes down to choices co-writers/directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz make in their story that deflate some of the intrigue they had set up. That said, they delivered an ending that, honestly, won me back by virtue of how it flipped those choices into a dark throughline that the characters end up following to a logical, tragic conclusion. I’m still not terribly happy about how they got there, however.
The film begins with the loss of a mother for Aidan (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh). It devastates them, and they find themselves living full-time with their father (Richard Armitage), whom is in love with Grace (Riley Keough), and wants to marry her. He brings up an idea for all of them to go out to a family cabin in the mountains for Christmas, although he’ll have to go back to work, leaving Grace and the kids some time to bond. Almost immediately after he leaves to go to work, though, some strange things seem to happen that isolates the three of them, and brings back past traumas; Grace also had a childhood trauma happen to her, when her father- a cult leader- led his congregation to suicide. Grace was the only survivor, but she seems to have put it behind her.
Especially in horror, and definitely because of “The Shining,” being isolated by snow, or being isolated in the wilderness, is one of my favorite settings for a film. Being trapped by the elements is something that speaks to me personally as a former Boy Scout, and when filmmakers make the most of it, I’m immediately on board. Fiala and Franz do a pretty good job of making the most of it, even when Richard is still around, and the ice cracks on a nearby pond. Cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis’s camera paints an unforgiving visual landscape, and the cabin the trio stay at is designed for maximum terror. When dad leaves, and things begin getting weird, there are stretches of this film that are on-par with “The Shining” and “The Witch” when it comes to people going crazy, especially Grace, and filmmakers have some keen ideas on how to do that in low-budget, effectively creepy, ways. There’s a choice made leading in to the third act, however, that just made me hate this movie, to a large degree, even though the filmmakers recover with the conclusion that makes sense to the narrative, and has a macabre sense of humor to go along with the pain these characters have experienced. I still hate that choice, however, because it took me out of my empathy for the characters at a moment the film needed me to follow through with it. The recovery was good, though, and I think the film merits genre fan’s attention, when all is said and done.
