**Spoiler warning for this blogpost**
Content warning for this post and the movie:
Suicide and mental illness
Y'all. I wanted to like The Lodge. I really did. Directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, who also directed the very upsetting Goodnight Mommy, the preview for The Lodge came out last fall and looked like exactly my type of arthouse spooky: a creepy house, stark cinematography, a musical score designed to raise goosebumps. Before I even saw the movie, I could tell it borrowed heavily from Hereditary and The Shining--two of my favorite scary movies.
Alas, The Lodge did not live up to my expectations. It's both problematic and boring. It teases a fascinating backstory and doesn't follow through. It's mean-spirited, humorless, and aside from a few jump scenes it's not even that scary. It's just really sad.
First, I'll tell you why it's problematic: The Lodge uses mental illness as its "Big Bad". There are no ghosts in this movie. No axe-wielding serial killers. No ghouls or goblins. But there is a woman who came from a hugely traumatic background and suffers from mental illness and there are kids who steal her meds. That's it. The "bad guy" is simply a woman having a mental breakdown when some punk-ass kids gaslight her. Folks suffering from mental illness already face stigma and misunderstanding--they don't need this dumb horror movie encouraging the erroneous belief that if you struggle with mental illness you're a psycho who is going to kill everyone.
The plot: Worst dad in the world, Richard (Richard Armitage), leaves his wife (Alicia Silverstone) for a much younger woman, Grace (Riley Keough, doing great work in a thankless role). It's not just that Grace is young--she also grew up in a Christian fundamentalist cult where all the members killed themselves except for her (she was specifically spared to pass on the message of the cult). So we have a young woman who grew up incredibly sheltered and then faced unbelievable trauma before ol' Dick came along and blew up his own marriage to get with her.
It only gets worse. Richard's kids, Aiden (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh), are understandably not very fond of Grace. But after Richard's ex-wife fucking blows her brains out (yep, we the audience get to see it), they REALLY don't like Grace, especially since a mere six months after their mother's suicide, Richard announces he's marrying Grace and they're all spending Christmas together in their family's cabin in the mountains. Richard is a real piece of work.
Well, like father like kids, I guess, because after Richard leaves his children with Grace in the cabin to go back into the city to get some work done before the holidays (classic Bad Movie Dad behavior), these little fucksticks decide to play a trick on Grace. While she's asleep, they basically take all the food in the cabin, all the outdoor gear like coats, all personal items--including Grace's medicine--and hide it and then pretend they don't know what's going on when Grace starts freaking out. Technically, it's not officially revealed that it was the kids who did this until partway through the movie, so at first the audience is just as confused as Grace. Kind of. When Aiden mentions he had a dream that they all died in a gas heater explosion, it starts to become clear that this is all one massive, and absolutely cruel, prank.
Without her meds and with Aiden convincing her that actually they all died and are in purgatory, Grace starts to lose it. I guess Aiden was smart enough to pre-plan an elaborate hoax but not smart enough to--I don't know--make sure to take away the handgun Richard left Grace when he went into town. That's right--at one point, Grace stands in front of the kids in a fugue state, HOLDING A GUN, and neither kid thinks "maybe this person we're convincing is already dead and whose meds we've stolen shouldn't have access to a firearm" and swipes the gun. So, honestly, fuck them for being so cruel and oblivious. Maybe Mia gets a pass because she's younger and impressionable, but that piece of shit Aiden is definitely old enough to know right from wrong.
Anyway, so it looks like Grace is about to kill the kids, then Richard comes back and you think he's going to save the day, but hahahahah, nope! Grace shoots him in the fucking head and then forces the kids to sit at the dining table with her and their dead dad while she prays and prepares to kill the rest of them. The End! What a fun movie.
The more I think about it, fuck this movie. Not only does it make mental illness the Monster, it also has this interesting backstory--Grace being in a cult--that COULD HAVE played a role in the plot but, other that being proof that, yep, Grace was brainwashed as a kid and maybe a little of that brainwashing kicks in when she's off her meds, it serves no purpose to the story. I think there is a much more interesting movie hiding somewhere inside The Lodge. Cults are fascinating and instead of making this poor woman, tormented by a couple of kids, the killer of this movie, it would be so much more interesting if somehow the cult Grace grew up in was still involved.
So, I don't recommend this movie. If you're easily upset with depictions of suicide and with offensive and inaccurate portrayals of people struggling with mental illness, this will be a difficult and unrewarding film for you. If you're a horror lover, The Lodge really has nothing new or interesting to say. Hereditary did it better. The Shining did it WAY better. The Lodge is just riding the coattails of better films from the past.
Grade: C
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