The Lodge (2019) - Review
Psychological horror movies are a fun time and their style can vary greatly, simply due to the nature of the horror itself. It can be stylistic and surreal, like The Cell, Susperia, or The Babadook, where everything is wild and plays with reality. It might follow an artistic perspective while still being horrific and creepy. It can also be more personally driven by the characters themselves, like the original Haunting, The Shining, or Alice Sweet Alice, in which the sanity of the characters is the focus. In those situations, we as an audience might be more concerned about how the characters’ sanity is being affected by events. We may not be sure what we’re seeing or hearing is real, or just a fabrication of the character’s mind. The Lodge sets the stage for the latter sort of psychological horror experience and traps three people, one of whom has her significant issues, in an isolated cabin during a snowstorm.
Pros
Solid acting from most of the cast
Great wide-angle shots of the landscape and cinematography
Cons
Takes a while before the linchpin moment of the movie to occur and doesn’t really pick up the pace once that happens
Premise of the film is somewhat weak and falls apart, making the characters unlikeable and the tension less palatable
Lacks urgency
Plot & Thoughts
Richard Hall (Richard Armitage) and his two children Aiden (Jaeden Martel) and Mia (Lia McHugh) are going through a hard time. Well, the kids are anyway because their mother (Alicia Silverstone) committed suicide upon being told by Richard that he wanted a divorce. If the event upset Richard, he does a poor job of showing it to his kids, because he seems to be more concerned about his new girlfriend, Grace (Riley Keough), who was probably one of the reasons he wanted a divorce in the first place. The kids obviously are not comfortable with this woman in their lives, but he’s very insistent on making it work. What would you do if you were in this awkward situation in which the children of your lover just lost their mom to suicide and you wanted to connect with them in some way? Grace thinks it’s a good idea to take a trip to an isolated cabin for Christmas so they can spend time together.
It doesn’t take long until there is some sort of arbitrary reason as to why Richard has to leave the three of them there by themselves. It also is established pretty early on that Grace, despite her good intentions and friendly appearance was the sole survivor of a cult that committed mass suicide. As anyone might suspect, there’s a good chance she may be psychologically fragile as a result. How this detail is established is somewhat stupid, in my opinion, but it is probably the most important detail about the character and it is crucial to explaining what occurs later in the movie.
There’s not a whole lot I can say in detail about The Lodge without disclosing important details that give away spoilers and plot twists, so I’ll have to keep it vague. That being said, I didn’t care for it much.
Unlike in other isolation movies like The Shining, I found the tension and urgency to be mostly absent from The Lodge. As the situation worsens for Grace her reactions never quite convinced me she was as crazy as she was supposed to be. There were a few fleeting moments in which a dream occurred or she encountered something that was odd, but it never got weird enough for me to believe the story I was being fed.
I don’t think Riley Keough is necessarily a bad actress, but I think her abilities and the directing just didn’t manage to pull off a real sense of psychological dread or urgency. Not to mention, the scenes in which she was angry did not work well, as her screams were mostly shrieks that I could barely understand without subtitles. The events of the film didn’t feel very connected; things were just happening and we were expected to assume that she had become less psychologically stable. Not to mention, whenever anything escalated, it did so at odd times and not at moments that would have made me more concerned for the situation of the characters.
Ultimately, I ended up disliking most of the characters to the point of not caring what happened to them. Naturally, this removed a lot of tension around scenes that were supposed to be very dramatic and at the film’s height of its excitement. The revelations that occur also point to details earlier in the movie that just make it difficult for me to accept decisions made by characters, which only made me dislike them even more. It’s not a sin to make characters dislikeable. In fact, there have been plenty of dislikeable characters in movies for whom you might still want to win or survive a harrowing situation. However, if I don’t have much of a desire for the characters to survive a predicament to which I hold them responsible, then there’s not much reason for me to feel any attachment or fear for their situation.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
The Lodge takes a very straightforward approach to the psychological horror genre and ultimately misses the mark. The circumstances the everyone is in would certainly be a stressful one, but the characters did not do enough to pull me in, or give me a real sense of tension or urgency. In a lot of ways, the characters undermine their own opportunities for empathy and ruin the climax, which is where the movie is supposed to reach its white knuckled apex of anxiety.
