Mark Reviews Movies: THE LODGE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 6, 2020

We think we know what's coming in The Lodge. We think we know the game that the film's three screenwriters are playing. The story is presented as one of those mysteries in which the truth of events could go one way or another, and the answer seems as if it could be decided by the toss of a coin.

Sergio Casci, Veronika Franz, and Severin Fiala, the screenwriters, are definitely playing a game here, but it's much deeper than just trying to surprise us with the truth of the strange occurrences, odd visions, and questionable situations that befall a group of characters at a lodge in the middle of nowhere at the height of winter. Here's a film that sees the truth as a matter of perspective. After all, reality may be an objective thing, but each of us also exists within our own reality—defined by what we see and how we interpret those things, based on our past experience. We live in reality, yes, but we also create it.

The success of the film, directed by Franz and Fiala, is that it allows us to understand the realities that these characters have created for themselves. We can see and sympathize with their perspectives, and the horror of this story is not in the possibilities of what might actually be happening in the lodge and to the characters. It's that these characters exist within the separate realities of their respective minds. They don't understand or sympathize with each other, because they either won't or can't.

This is mostly a complicated way of saying that the story is about a pair of kids who are stuck in a cabin with the woman who wants to become their stepmother. This is uncomfortable enough, since the woman, named Grace (Riley Keough), came between Richard (Richard Armitage), the children's father, and Laura (Alicia Silverstone), their mother. That's the way Aidan (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh), the two kids, see it, at least.

In what amounts to an extended prologue, we first identify with the children. They're going about their lives, complicated by the reality of separated parents. Richard wants to finalize the couple's divorce, because he and Grace want to get married. The prologue actually takes the perspective of Laura, whom we first see crying in front of a mirror while getting ready to drop off her children at Richard's house.

She spots Grace exiting through the backyard while Richard drops the news, and there's such purposeful simplicity to that shot, as well as a few others. We spend the prologue and part of the first act never seeing Grace's face.

We see her back, her silhouette, and the back of her head. Franz and Fiala treat her presence in the same way that Laura and the children see her—someone whose existence is an unwelcome mystery. She could be anyone. She could have any type of personality. We, though, only know her as "the other woman" and, after Laura makes a sudden and violent exit from the story, as the person who has destroyed this family.

We're put into the midst of that horrible destruction. It's devastating—with an inconsolable Mia being comforted by her older brother, with the children refusing to let Grace into their lives, with Aidan trying to discover the past of his father's girlfriend. As a child, Grace was part of a religious cult—the sole survivor of an act of mass suicide. She still could be anyone, but what we do know about her doesn't make us feel too comfortable about her presence.

Then, in the car before setting out for the lodge and after plenty of shots of Grace as a presence but not a person, Grace turns her head to look at the kids. The smile is kind and bashful and hopeful (Keough's performance maintains that naïve innocence, which only makes the third act more terrible). In an instant, it all changes. Everything we thought we knew about Grace—everything we heard, in other words—cannot be right.

The most substantial element of this film, which observes as Grace and the children (who are alone in the cabin after Richard returns to the city for a few days at work) undergo some inexplicable phenomena involving disembodied voices and nightmares and things disappearing, is how firmly it establishes the perspectives of these characters. That's not just how Franz and Fiala play with perspective from a narrative standpoint (i.e., through whose eyes are the story being told at any given moment). It's also and mainly in how well we can comprehend and identify with the fears, the doubts, the suspicions, the motivations, and the goals of each party—Grace and the two children.

The film's mystery is not in what's happening in the house—whether it's real, some kind of trick, or a sort of delusional thinking on the part of a traumatized mind. It's in knowing that the two parties' perspectives can never be reconciled. The dread is in coming to understand that there are no red herrings here. Everything that happens actually does happen. How and why it's happening, though, is all a matter of perspective.

The horror of The Lodge, then, is not in the visions or the noises or the seemingly unexplainable occurrences. The filmmakers take their time, not in going from one scare moment to the next, but in establishing these characters, their motives, their goals, and their irreconcilable differences of perspective. The true horror is learning just how wide those differences are and how inevitable the consequences turn out to be.

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