The Lodge (

2019

)

In an age where artsy horror movies run for two and a half hours on average and are overflowing with stupid tangents and pointless asides, I have to commend The Lodge for its restrained and focused story. Of particular note is the introduction. The Lodge starts very quiet, with Laura, a recently separated mother, dropping her two kids off at their father's for the weekend. However, it doesn't waste any time getting loud when in the next scene Laura heads home, pours herself a glass of red wine and blows her brains out. You see, Richard, her ex-husband wants to finalize the divorce so he can marry his girlfriend Grace, and the prospect of seeing that is too much for Laura to bear. Their kids, Aiden and Mia, blame Richard and Grace for their mom's suicide, focusing a particular hatred on Grace. If it was going to be hard for Grace to take on her new role of step-mother before the suicide, then afterward it's going to be damn near impossible. Still, Richard is determined to make things work, so although he has to work over the holiday he decides that he'll drop Grace and the kids up at his vacation home in the mountains for Christmas. He figures that a few days of close confines can brute force a familial relationship between the trio. It's a terrible idea, but he goes through with it all the same. At the same time, the kids are starting to turn up some disturbing stuff in Grace's past. She was the daughter of a radical Christian preacher who led his whole congregation in ritual suicide, leaving Grace alone to spread the good word to the heathens of the world.

Boom! We're barely fifteen minutes in and already we've established all the characters, their motivations, their conflicts with each, gotten them to the isolated local where the rest of the film will unfold and dropped a couple of dark hints at what is going to come next. This is a film that is not fucking around with the pacing. Each scene in the intro lasts exactly as long as it needs to flesh out the characters or drop a key bit of exposition. Ari Aster could stand to take a few lessons. As I noted in my review of Midsommar (2019), Aster is a stylish director but the way he paces his stories is just abysmal. Indeed, I suspect that co-directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala are specifically targeting Aster's film with their introduction and providing a bit of subtle critique. After all, they open with a shot of a dollhouse and later when the kids are in the car Mia dangles the head of her doll out the window. If that's not a reference to Aster's earlier film Heredity (2018) then I don't know what is.

Aside from being an excellent example of a relatively complicated backstory delivered efficiently and stylishly, the opening of The Lodge does one thing else of interest: We don't see Grace for the entire time. Keeping your main character off-screen for the first fifteen minutes of your movie is a daring move in most circumstances, but seldom have I seen it done so flagrantly as it is here. The other characters are constantly talking about Grace, about her dark past in the cult, and about how they blame her for Laura's suicide. Moreover, when she does enter into the story she's kept behind frosted glass so all we see is a silhouette. Since she's kept from the audience for so long, the viewer's imaginations are free to run wild and build her up into a mysterious or even monstrous figure. So when she is finally revealed to be a rather unremarkable young woman who is introduced in a rather unremarkable way (she gets into the car with Richard, Aiden, and Mia and turns around to say hello to the kids) the viewer will find themselves suspicious of Grace but for no readily discernible reason. It's not a subtle way of planting a seed of doubt in the minds of the viewer but it is stylish and effective. At this point in the story, I genuinely had no idea what would happen next.

Unfortunately, this feeling of uneasy uncertainty is not maintained for long. For the first few scenes, once everyone gets to the titular lodge, I was a bit unsure about Grace as I was still riding the initial unease from her bizarre introduction. The fact that she seems to be hiding her psychiatric medication from Richard in one scene was also a cause for concern. However, as she shifts from mysterious entity to protagonist, it becomes pretty obvious that despite her past trauma, Grace has no sinister intentions and indeed is managing her life as best as she can under the circumstances. Is she a little off, yeah, but more in the form of being a bit socially awkward and a touch anxious. The main problem is that there just is nothing menacing or even mysterious about the character once she begins to emerge. She just seems like any run-of-the-mill 20-something girl. Even her background in the cult seems distant, at least at first, as she has made an active effort to distance herself from it. Indeed, the kids quickly become the more sinister figures in the film, particularly Aiden after Grace catches him peeking on her in the shower. Sure, there's nothing particularly troubling about a boy his age being a bit of an awkward pervert, but rather the shamelessness with which he does it, staring at her intently even after he's been caught red-handed.

Once Richard heads back to work, things get weird, starting right after the trio falls asleep watching The Thing (1982) (apparently Grace has the same ideas about what is and isn't acceptable children's entertainment as my dad). They wake up to find the gas generator has shut off and nearly all the food in the house has gone missing along with their coats and Grace's medication. The lodge is miles from civilization, and with all their cell phones out of juice, there is no way to call for help. Since Richard took the only car (a really cool old school Jeep Wagoneer with wood-paneled sides) they are stuck until he drives back up to rescue them, spitting the odd jar of chili with few crumbs of crackers. It's at this point that the kids become oddly insistent that they all died in a freak accident with the gas heater, and that they have become trapped in purgatory.

I'm no big-brained genius; indeed in many ways, I'm about as average as they come. I got straight Bs in school, work a job that requires some rudimentary technical knowledge, and I get bored in movies where nobody gets shot and nothing explodes. I seldom guess plot twists, so when I can predict whatever turns the story will take well in advance of them happening you have a bit of a problem with being too obvious. I guessed the first twist, that the three characters died from the malfunctioning gas heater and are now trapped in purgatory as soon as the film cut to the dream sequence. The second twist, that they were not dead at all and It was just a game the kids were playing with the possible intention of driving Grace crazy, I guessed shortly thereafter (and well in advance of the big reveal). The problem here is that the kids lay it on way too thick with the whole “are we dead?” and “is this purgatory” almost right out of the bat. Settle down there junior, we've got another 45 minutes left and if you're cluing the audience in on the big secret so soon then you must be up to something. All this film needs is a little more restraint and it could be downright compelling as I would be genuinely unsure about what is real and what isn't. As it stands I was never fully unnerved by the film because I always knew what it was trying to do.

The dream sequences exemplify this problem nicely. They are well done, and effective sequence when taken on their own merits including some macabre images to great effect (one moment in particular when Grace finds herself stranded in an endless expanse of icy whiteness recalls the end of The Beyond (1981)). Yet whenever a dream sequence happens the viewer is always aware that it is just a dream. Great psychological horror movies like Perfect Blue (1997) and Repulsion (1965) blur the line between delusions and reality, putting the audience into the same mental space as the protagonist. In The Lodge, we have a similar situation where reality is breaking down for Grace, but what is real and what is not are obvious at all times for the viewer. Since we always know what is a dream and what is not, we are never in the same position as Grace. Were the film better in this regard it could have been a classic, as it stands its just a pretty good movie with a few bold stylish flourishes.