Film Review: THE LODGE (2019): A Dreary Horror Film That Lacks A Cold Sting

The Lodge Review

The Lodge (2019) Film Review, a movie directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, and starring Riley Keough, Jaeden Martell, Lia McHugh, Richard Armitage, Alicia Silverstone, Daniel Keough, and Lola Reid.

Some people can afford to travel to cabins in the woods for some quality R&R. The rest of us have to rely on stuffy horror movies to put us to sleep.

Such is the case with Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s The Lodge, an attempt at claustrophobic psychological terror that can’t escape its cynical callousness.

Following the sudden death of their mother (Alicia Silverstone), Aidan and Mia (Jaedan Martell and Lia McHugh, respectively) are reticent to welcome their father’s (Richard Armitage) new girlfriend Grace (Riley Keough) into their family with open arms. The fact their father left their late mother for Grace doesn’t assuage the children’s opinions of her…nor does the fact that Grace is the subject of their father’s new writing project…which focuses on Grace being the sole survivor of a Christian suicide cult, for which Aidan labels her a “psychopath”…

Regardless, their father is confident that he can foster unity between them all and takes them all out to his lakeside lodge to celebrate Christmas together. Things go as fine as they could between moody children and a stepmom to be…that is, until Grace is left to look after Aidan and Mia on her own when their father must return to the city for a few days of work.

Tensions start to rise, and things only worsen when the lodge’s electric and plumbing suddenly shut off. Other items start to mysteriously disappear (including her mood-altering pills), but one particular thing reappears instead: the voice of Grace’s father (Danny Keough), the leader of her former cult. As the dark shadows of the lodge encroach in on her, Grace’s grasp on reality begins to slip. She starts to question if this is spiritual punishment for once escaping her father’s grasp…or if this is a new terror altogether.

The Lodge follows Franz and Fiala’s previous feature, the German-language horror flick Goodnight Mommy, both in atmospheric tension and slow reveals. Thankfully, The Lodge is an improvement on Goodnight Mommy so far as it doesn’t put one of its major reveals early within the first act. Instead, it teases so many potential paths that one starts to feel like a cinematic sleuth, constantly weighing the probability of every possible outcome. If anything, the directing duo really works to keep us as the audience on our toes.

But by the time Franz and Fiala are forced to choose one particular thread that will lead us to the ending, our sleuthing feels all for naught. The thread that they go with severely weakens the thematic prowess of all the other ones – arguably to the point of turning them all into hollow red herrings.

The concept of religious fervor and clerical abuse becomes nothing but set dressing to “explain” Grace’s anxiety. Her regression back into her father’s fundamentalism takes center stage, complete with conservative costuming and vague masochistic imagery (manifested by duct-tape mouth coverings with “SIN” written on them with a Sharpie). This foregrounding nullifies the potential for analysis on any of the other complexities of faith that the film teases – particularly, Mia’s faith in the concept of an afterlife, and how that ties in with the abrupt passing of her religious mother – leaving their strands to dangle off into the ether.

It’s also tangential to the film’s overall confusion over what type of horror film it wants to be. The Lodge tantalizes us with possibilities at being a ghost story, a tale of demonic possession, or even a good old-fashioned monster movie (mostly because of that prolonged scene where Grace, Aidan, and Mia seemingly watch a sizzle reel of the mutation shots from John Carpenter’s The Thing). The film ultimately settles for psychological horror, but even there it fumbles the delivery. Rather than leaning in to the existential terror that their purgatorial entrapment could manifest, Franz and Fiala instead take the route of quasi-sadism through to the finale. That decision isn’t void of its own shock and discomfort, but for what’s ostensibly psychological horror it offers very little psychological insight beyond what could again be labeled as thematic set dressing. There are no great revelations to be had here beyond an observance of cruel nihilism, which itself feels constrained to the small puzzle of the narrative, thus rendering it rather toothless.

I’m not the first to bring up The Thing’s presence in The Lodge, but it is odd for the filmmakers to place it here in a way that begs for comparison. Carpenter’s films definitely have their pessimistic streak, but they all serve some thematic purpose. Sure, Franz and Fiala might confuse nihilism for pessimism, but even still their primary goal seems only to be to provoke audiences for simply rambunctious gains. It’s an odd cousin to the works of Ari Aster, in that the film’s third-act resorting to a more tangible horror both cheapens the tangible horror approach and leaves the more existential horror thread abandoned out of a lack of interest in further pursuing it (or potentially even out of a lack of confidence in their directorial execution).

Perhaps these gripes can be written off as clashes with the original material (which Franz and Fiala apparently re-wrote from Sergio Casci’s original script) but that’s still a lot of leeway being granted to the disappointment at what’s essentially the core of the film. It also doesn’t make up for the fact that the first half of the film is egregiously arduous in its pacing, agonizingly muffled in its sound design, and exacerbated by way too many calling cards of art-house prestige that don’t really match the film’s endgame. (A good dolly shot is great, but you are aware that you can use a tripod every now and then, right?)

The Lodge is very much like its setting: distant, dreary, and cold. Sometimes that’s a winning combo, but only when it deals more of a sting. This should’ve given me frostbite, but really, it only offered up cold feet.

Rating: 5/10

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