Siblings Aidan (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh) are coping with some big, traumatic changes in their lives. Their mother Laura (Alicia Silverstone) has recently committed suicide and their father (Richard Armitage) has moved swiftly on to a new romantic interest. Grace (Riley Keough) tries to bond with Aidan and Mia, but she quickly finds there’s little common ground there. Then, family-fueled trauma is nothing new for Grace: she’s the sole survivor of a Jonestown-esque mass suicide event presided over by her cult leader dad. Richard thinks the key to getting these two camps to gel is by forcing them to spend time alone at a remote lodge together. But of course, the snow flies, the power dies, and Grace and the kids are left to fend for themselves. No power and heat is one thing, but increasingly inexplicable events force Grace and the kids to consider whether the nature of their isolation may be more sinister.
The remote Massachusetts cabin where most of the film takes place provides a strong setting for the film’s naturalistic cinematography. Muted light reflecting off the snow and shadows playing off rich wood-paneled walls, from which Laura’s religious icons loom, give the film a grounded feel. The visuals and similarly strong score could’ve been potent assets to telling an intense, claustrophobic story had the film done a better job figuring out what it was trying to say.
The Lodge deals with themes like grief, trauma, and religion throughout, but those themes don’t feel connected to what’s going on in the film’s central conflict: an inexperienced mother figure and her unwilling charges dealing with a life-threatening situation. With much of the kids’ half of the narrative dealing with the mistrust of their soon-to-be stepmom, most of The Lodge’s thematic work comes from Grace’s side of the story. The problem there is that, just as The Lodge wants to constantly call into question what’s keeping Grace and the kids trapped in the snow, Grace’s dubious reliability as a focal character leads anything gleaned from time spent with her to be taken with a grain of salt. That means that a lot of the work The Lodge does building tension goes astray, as most of the time it’s unclear what is a real threat and what is not. It’s a narrative miscalculation that hurts a lot of the movie, particularly through the second act, as most of the film’s attempts to shock the audience out of its comfort zone don’t actually feel all that threatening.
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Fans of Goodnight, Mommy know that directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala like to play with their audience’s sympathies toward their characters. At various times throughout, The Lodge asks you to put aside your feelings towards the kids in favor of Grace, and vice versa. The problem with that here is that ask becomes harder and harder to accept, given how erratic and violent Grace becomes. Aidan and Mia are presented for most of the film as genuinely good kids, so when they cross a line in how they’re dealing with Grace, it feels indicative of a mean streak the movie has, out of character, and engineered to keep the story interesting. It’s not the only time in the film Franz and Fiala’s hands are visible moving pieces into place - convenient snowstorms and choices with ill-defined motivation keep The Lodge feeling like something you’re watching, not something you’re particularly drawn into. Speaking of Goodnight, Mommy, The Lodge shares a certain amount of DNA with Franz and Fiala’s debut, to the point where parts of this story may feel like a rehash of that less seen Austrian film. While they may enjoy playing with the motif of distrust between parent and child, Franz and Fiala retread a lot of the same thematic ground here as they did in Goodnight, Mommy.
None of that should be considered a knock against Keough’s centerpiece performance in The Lodge. Keough plays Grace with a shyness and fragility that holds firm in her initial good faith attempts to bond with Aidan and Mia, all the way through her breakdown at the lodge. Impressively, despite Grace’s pretty terrible babysitting skills, Keough keeps Grace from feeling like someone to root against, even if you won’t be sure why you’d want to root for her. Likewise, Jaeden Martell and Lia McHugh hold their own as Grace’s wards. Martell brings intelligence and sensitivity to his watchful big brother, traits which may evoke comparisons to his turn as Bill Denbrough in IT: Chapter One. McHugh gets the heavier emotional lifting. Mia is clearly devastated by the loss of their mother, clinging to a doll that resembles her, and McHugh does an impressive job when the film calls for her to let us see that pain. Keough, Martell, and McHugh’s interplay is the backbone of The Lodge, and if the three of them weren’t working as hard as they are, the whole film may have collapsed. Richard Armitage has very little to do, other than strand the leads together at his cabin. Alicia Silverstone gets even less screen time and considering her brief appearance teases a really interesting foil to Grace, her absence feels particularly disappointing as the film goes on.
Verdict
Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s The Lodge strands a trio of capable actors in a beautifully shot house full of crucifixes and ghosts of the past, but devoid of much in the way of tension or drama. The story’s turns feel designed to mislead for the plot’s sake and distract from the more interesting character work, like Grace’s struggle with her haunted past and the kids’ unwillingness to let her be part of the family. If The Lodge had focused as much on its three leads as it did on building a creepy atmosphere to put them in, it may have been as terrorizing an experience as it aspired to be.
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