Austrian writer-directors Fiala & Franz made kind of a splash with Goodnight Mommy, a few years back now, and that was a movie I very much wanted to like, but just couldn’t at the end of the day because of the way it went off the rails in the last half. Still, I found their visual style to be striking and their ability to create an atmosphere of creeping dread for the first half of that movie to be compelling enough that I knew walking out of Goodnight Mommy, which was after all their first horror film, that I’d be checking out whatever they did next. And then along comes The Lodge, where Riley Keough, an actress that impresses me more with every performance, plays a young woman who finds herself snowed in with her soon-to-be-stepchildren at a remote mountain lodge. To say that Fiala & Franz are able to duplicate the atmosphere of slowly tightening dread that made Goodnight Mommy as much of a success as it was would be an understatement. In the years since Goodnight Mommy, they’ve clearly honed their craft and their usage of the camera here is really just superlative. As the camera explores the lodge, it creates an atmosphere that’s creepy, unsettling and incredibly suspenseful. This isn’t a movie for the horror fan that likes big ol’ jump scares (though there is one absolutely brutally effective jump scare that made me just about levitate out of my seat at one point) or loads of gore. But if you like being slowly drawn into dread and terror that gnaws at your nerves as it inexorably tightens the screws, then The Lodge is your kind of movie.
The rest of the movie’s cast is also quite good, though Keough definitely holds center stage once she enters the film, which brings up something interesting I want to talk about in a minute. Alicia Silverstone is in the film very briefly as the ex-wife of Keough’s fiancé, the woman he left for Grace, Keough’s character. She’s not just good, she’s downright brilliant, though the plot requires her to be shuffled off-stage very quickly. Richard Armitage is good, if underused, as the fiancé. Jaeden Martell is very good, as he always is, as the petulant teenage son, bitter at the way his parents’ marriage broke up and full of anger at Grace. Lia McHugh is fine as the younger daughter of the broken family; she’s not preternaturally great or anything, but she’s solid and rarely rings false and that’s good enough to be worth noting among actors of her age. The score by Danny Bensi & Saunder Jurriaans is absolutely nerve-shredding, ambient tension building drones broken up by slashes of dissonance.
As to what the film is really up to, well, it has a lot on its mind. I loved the way the movie treated Grace at the beginning, leaving her hovering just off screen for several minutes. We see her as a silhouette at an upper window or catch a glimpse of her back as she goes out a door. At first we’re seeing her through the eyes of Silverstone’s character and it’s as if Grace herself is the ghost haunting this family and thematically there’s something to that. But Grace is a deeply traumatized character and if the film is about anything it’s about just how easily a once broken mind can be broken again. This was a big part of the themes of Goodnight Mommy as well. Psyches can heal after horrible traumas and people can find a sense of self again and move forward, but these movies are fundamentally about how that scar tissue that enables a person to carry on with their lives is frighteningly flimsy. It’s a terrifying idea and Keough is really good at communicating Grace’s struggle to retain her mind as things begin to get increasingly weird. Ultimately, the architecture of the healed mind is painfully fragile and as Grace begins to lose her sense of certainty about the reality of the things she’s experiencing, it’s a harrowing thing to watch.
Are there problems? Oh, yes, absolutely. This film has, interestingly enough, the exact same problems as Goodnight Mommy. I try to, more or less, approach every film on its own; I shouldn’t spend a tremendous amount of time in a review of The Lodge talking about Goodnight Mommy, for example. But I feel that the similarities here in the failures of the two films are incredibly instructive. As in Goodnight Mommy, The Lodge shoehorns in a “big twist” close to the end and, as in Goodnight Mommy, it’s a revelation that makes the previous thirty to forty-five minutes of the movie make absolutely no sense. And then, again, as in Goodnight Mommy, once the twist is revealed and a large chunk of the movie is rendered nonsensical, the script just . . . doesn’t have an ending, so it just coasts to a slow stop and, well, yeah, that’s a good word actually: the movie doesn’t really “end,” it just “stops.” What I will say is that these problems here are not nearly as bad as they are in Goodnight Mommy, so I want to underline the fact that Fiala and Franz have greatly improved their game since Goodnight Mommy. The highs here are far higher and they last longer; the lows here are not as low and not as serious. But I think what I’d love to see is these two direct a movie they didn’t write. Because the technical elements of building suspense, dread and terror, they’ve got down; the problems are all on the writing side of things. But still, even with those caveats, The Lodge is a brilliant piece of horror cinema, unsettling and upsetting in all the right ways, beautifully shot and well performed. I walked out of Goodnight Mommy still on board with the filmmakers even though I wasn’t with the movie; walking out of The Lodge I’m even more excited. The first two-thirds to three-quarters of this thing isn’t just good; it’s downright great and even those missteps at the end can’t erase the lingering thoughts and emotions of the body of the film. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – beautifully directed, well performed & a masterclass in slow-burning dread, unease and terror; screenplay goes off the rails near the end, but it’s still haunting and compelling overall. 3 ½ stars.