In 2014 Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala made their feature film debut with the psychological thriller Goodnight Mommy, garnering critical acclaim as one of the top international films of the year. Amid the buzz, I sought it out and came away extremely disappointed with what I considered a film too straightforward to shoulder the weight of the twisty story it was trying to tell. Watching it I knew that there was going to be an eventual kink in the narrative and scope of the film limited the possibilities of how it was all going to end. In so many words, I felt it was predictable and derivative of thrillers that came before it, most notably A Tale of Two Sisters, an excellent Korean horror drama that mirrors a lot of the same themes and plot points.
Much like Goodnight Mommy, Franz and Fiala’s English-language follow-up The Lodge is ostensibly also a three-character film. Shortly after their mother commits suicide, Aiden (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh) are forced to play nice with their father’s new girlfriend Grace (Riley Keough), someone they both blame for their mother’s death. When a snowstorm traps the trio together in an isolated cabin strange things begin to happen, causing Grace to contend with the vitriol of the children as well as echoes of her dark past.
With such a similar setup, I was worried The Lodge would run into the same issues I had with Goodnight Mommy. Set primarily in a single house with only three characters for the majority of the run-time, there were only so many ways things could turn out. Fortunately, this time around the entire movie doesn’t solely hinge on how things resolve themselves. All three of the primary cast are fantastic. Jaeden Martell (formerly Lieberher) of It, Knives Out, and St. Vincent is, in my opinion, one of the best and most consistent child actors of recent years and alongside Lia McHugh paints a realistic interpretation of a grieving child full of angst and hatred. McHugh gets MVP points for the best on-screen crying I have ever seen from a child actor.
Because the plot was propped up by great acting, I found myself less concerned with where everything was going and more interested in what was happening right then and there. When the explanation behind the strange occurrences is finally revealed, it doesn’t seem like a surprise twist, but rather a logical outcome to which we’ve arrived nonchalantly. It’s the last 15 to 20 minutes beyond this reveal that I really think drags the film down. Without diving too deeply into spoilers, the film commits a little too hard to its themes of religion, redemption, and repentance and kind of stumbles its way into an uninteresting and frankly lazy conclusion.
Overall, The Lodge is a well-crafted claustrophobic thriller that does a lot with a fairly straight-forward premise. Those looking for pulse-pounding or gore-splattered horror might need to look elsewhere as this slow-burn psychological thriller holds its cards close to its chest for most of the show. However, in the end, it is smothered by its need to tie things up too precisely, leaving very little to ponder when all was said and done.
7