The Lodge: Those Meddling Kids

There’s a particular type of film - rare, but not unheard-of - that I like to call the “seven-ten split.” See, most films that I watch for this thing of mine exhibit some degree of consistency. They may be good, they may be mediocre, they may be bad, but whatever it is they are, it’s pretty steady across the length of the film or across aspects of production. But every now and then, I’ll get one that does some things (or even most things) very well, but then fucks something up so spectacularly that it casts a pall over the rest of the film. 

Every film is a set of decisions, and though it’s unusual for one or two to mar an otherwise skillful production, The Lodge manages just that. It marries striking visuals and impressive timing to narrative choices that damn near sink the whole thing.

Richard is a divorcee who is trying to get his children Aiden and Mia to warm up to his new girlfriend (and soon-to-be fiancée) Grace. They’re not having any of it, carrying a fair amount of resentment at how their parents’ marriage ended and the role they see Grace as playing in that. Nonetheless, Richard wants the four of them to spend the Christmas holiday at the family lodge, far up in the mountains and far away from town. He’ll bring Grace and the kids up a week or so before Christmas, return to the city for work, and join them for the holiday. He thinks that if they just take the time to get know Grace, they’ll come around.

So it’s the two kids and the soon-to-be-stepmom they hate, all alone in the middle of nowhere. So that’s awkward. It doesn’t get any better when a blizzard comes in, knocking out the power.

And it gets even wore when they wake up one morning to find their phones dead, and the entire lodge emptied of everything. Clothes, food…

...the medicine Grace needs to keep the nightmares away.

Right off the bat, this film is trying to maintain a tricky balancing act- on the one hand, it’s potentially the story of two kids left alone with a possibly unstable woman, isolated up in the mountains. On the other, it’s potentially a story of the supernatural - why is the lodge empty? Why don’t their phones work? Why can’t they get the generator to function? What happened overnight? Either would work just fine, and for that matter, there’s a way to get these two stories to intersect that could be really interesting, but this is where the problems begin. In order to make those two possibilities work, you have to keep the audience guessing, maintaining a certain amount of ambiguity throughout. And once you commit to a particular resolution, it should be one that feels like we could have seen coming or one that makes sense in terms of the film’s internal logic. 

The first big problem this film has is with ambiguity, revealing something about Grace’s past pretty early on in ham-handed and obvious fashion. It would have been handled better indirectly and through judicious use of flashbacks than just sort of plopping it into our laps all of a sudden. It’s up there with the opening credits of Sinister for “don’t show us this part yet, dammit.” She’s not a new girlfriend with a dark secret if you tell us the dark secret before the first act is out, and yet that is exactly what I see here. A lot of the potential tension is burned off because we’re robbed of the opportunity to discover what’s wrong with Grace, and that’s the kind of gradual realization and escalation of stakes that works well in slow-burn psychological horror.

The second big problem is in how it pays off its resolution, which it does in what strikes me as the dumbest, least probable way I could think of. They way I tend to think of this is in terms of the film’ internal logic. Now, the presence of the supernatural violates the internal logic of, say, a drama, but in a horror film you can bend or even break some of the rules of causality or physics or life and death or whatever. I don’t have a problem with that - what I do have a problem with is behavior from human beings in the film that doesn’t make sense in terms of how human beings behave. It’s really tough to talk about this without spoiling a major reveal in the film, but certain characters in this film behave in ways that are really tough to believe people actually would. We’re talking way less likely than the usual “why did they go into that dark room” stuff, because I think that’s lazy and cheap to criticize - people in horror movies don’t know that they’re in horror movies (Scream aside), but this isn’t that. This is so contrived that it yanked me right out of the film, and it ends up being the least dramatically interesting way you could pay off all of the remaining ambiguity of the first two acts. Not only is it highly implausible, it’s also not very interesting and kills the film’s momentum.

It’s incredibly frustrating (like, I went past “disappointed” and headed straight for “angry”) because, early reveal aside, this film starts off really really well and maintains a nice, simmering sense of unease for the first half or so, and I even like how it ends, but goddamn the path it takes to get there is intensely frustrating in how inept and improbable it feels. It feels shipped in from another, far lesser movie. It has excellent visual sense - there are lots of composed shots of icy landscapes and still, ominous interiors and repeated visual motifs, including an interesting one of a dollhouse interior that mimics the interior of the lodge. There are periodic cutaways to it throughout, and it seems like it should be communicating something, or that it is, but the third-act reveal that pissed me off so much just sort of trivializes it, making what could have been mysterious painfully literal. It does a really good job of using crisp, sudden edits to create tension, and holding a sense of stillness in some scenes just long enough to make what comes next genuinely startling. There’s a sequence early on that made me sort of jump without it being a jump scare. The acting is good throughout - restrained, understated, never really resorting to histrionics. In its staging and performance it’s tremendously self-assured, which makes some of the narrative choices all the more baffling.

In some ways I can’t help but compare this film (unfavorably) to Hereditary. I don’t think it plagiarized it or anything, but both deal with deaths in the family, strained relationships filled with resentment, and both use dollhouses as ways to tell the story. And both have a very strong visual sense. But Hereditary knew how to tease out information and then sort of connect all the dots in the end so you could see how everything fit together. This film just sort of tells you shit right up front, and pays it off in the least interesting way possible. It feels like someone started out to make a smart, icy psychological horror film and ended up with an adult episode of Scooby-Doo instead.

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