Aiden (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh) are children of a broken marriage. They live with their unstable mother, getting the occasional weekend or longer with their father, who is looking to remarry his girlfriend, Grace (Riley Keough). This doesn’t sit well with Aiden and Mia’s mother, who commits suicide. Time passes and the kids go to live with their father, but they have the unwanted intrusion of their soon-to-be stepmother hanging over them. They learn more about Grace, how she was the daughter of a cult leader whose followers committed suicide as Grace videotaped their deaths. Grace then became a patient of Aiden and Mia’s father, where she was put on anti-psychotics and normalized. The kids don’t like her, and when they get stuck alone with her on a wilderness Christmas trip in a remote house, they are less than thrilled. That’s when strange things begin to happen, and Grace and the kids are cutoff from the rest of the world, isolated and alone. Something is stalking them, stealing their food, Grace’s medications, and killing the electricity. Is it some supernatural entity, or something far more human threatening their lives?
The Lodge is very much a ghost story, with not a single apparition in sight. These specters that plague our characters all have to do with their pasts and present. Grace lives in the shadow of her insane father and what he did, not only to her but to the cult that followed him. She has the phantasms of her regrets, of her fears, and of what she has done. Aiden and Mia are haunted by the loss of their mother and their very real apprehensions about Grace and their father getting married. These ghosts dance at the fringes of the story, haunting every action our trio takes for the duration of the film. As Grace goes days without her medication, she comes further and further unglued. The children don’t fare much better, as the stress of the situation (no electricity, a snowstorm, their father being gone) begins to weigh on them, too. In the end, who is the most haunted is the first to crack, and the results are heartbreaking and devastating, and all too human.
This isn’t an easy film to watch. It is long and slow (too long, to be honest) but it never fails to compel interest. It is shot very much like a film Kubrick would make, with that static framing of images cluttered with information and yet feeling sparse, empty, and isolated. Paranoia and loneliness fills every moment, from when we first meet the children until the final seconds before the credits roll. This is an oppressive film, smothering the viewer in despair and regret. This is exactly the kind of “Arthouse Horror” that everyone raves about loving but usually gets ignored because it doesn’t have that A24 pretentiousness that all too many of these kinds of films carry. This is stately, unnerving horror, no doubt, but it is never snobby and never pretends to be “important” or “meaningful.” The Lodge is more committed to telling its story than to showing off how “deep” it is. But don’t be confused, it is deep, it is meaningful, and it is scary as hell.
★★★✮
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