Never mind heartwarming vistas of families building snowmen and kids sledding down marshmallow white drifts; anyone who knows anything, knows that snow is fucking scary.
John Carpenter knew it, Stanley Kubrick knew it and the makers of 2019 psychological horror/thriller The Lodge was fairly clued up on that fact too as it emerged as a possible spirital successor to The Shining as it tackled insanity, isolation and imploding family units to chilling effect.
However, adding to the already uneasy tone and frosty surroundings is another trope that’s guaranteed to unsettle and the film also taps into the type of religious extremes that made Saint Maude and Piper Laurie’s character from Carrie so terrifying as the climate both inside and outside the titular building builds to a terrible, perfect storm.
But can directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala keep the tension viciously taunt enough to make The Lodge a horrifying, haunting stay – well pack your snow shoes and find out.
After finding out that her estranged husband, Richard, wants to finalise a divorce so he can Mary someone else, a despondent Laura Hall shockingly takes her own life leaving her two children, teenage Aiden and young Mia utterly and understandably devastated. However, while the two children instinctively despise their new stepmother to be, the well meaning Grace Marshall has something of a deeply traumatic past herself as she was raised in the dubious surroundings of a religious cult that was run by her extremist father and subsequently was the only survivor when everyone took their own life when she was a child. In fact, Richard and Grace met in the first place due to the author researching the cult for a book and subsequently fell in love with the now-grown woman.
While Grace is undeniably stable thanks to copious medication and a support dog named Grady, Richard displays a catastrophic inability to read a room when he hits upon the idea that they all should spend time at the family’s remote Massachusetts lodge for Christmas in order to fully bond a mere six months after Laura stuck a gun in her mouth. Even more questionable is Richard’s further plan of driving back home for work and leaving his bereaved kids and his uncertain fiancee alone in this place, assuming that some movie marathons and some hot cocoa will heal all wounds.
At first, the atmosphere proves to be more uncomfortable than the biting temperatures, but as Grace struggles to get these two hostile children to accept her, something utterly bizarre happens. Waking up one morning, Grace, Aiden and Mia find that all of their belongings have mysterious vanished (including Grace’s’ meds and Grady), there’s no food in the fridge and the heating doesn’t work. Worse yet, walking to civilisation has been rendered impossible because of the dangerous weather and the dates on the clocks state that the date is impossibly now the 9th of January.
What the hell is going on? Is it a devious prank? A spiteful attempt a psychological warfare or something far less rational? After all, without her meds, Grace is starting to react badly to all the religious iconography around the place and is starting to have visions of her father. But what if it’s something even weirder? What if they’ve all died?
The Lodge proves to be something of a perfect name for this movie because not only does include an actual Lodge (which helps), but lodge us also exactly what your heart will do in your throat numerous times throughout the viewing of this excellent thriller. However, making my job noticably tougher is the fact that, like many other examples of movies that attempt to scare via suffocating you with palpable dread, it’s far more effective the less you know. In fact, I fully admit that in my synopsis, I may have let too many things slip already because the filmmakers take great pains to keep you off balance much in the same way Ari Aster did in Hereditary as human trauma and despair kicks off the plot with an act of suicide so out of the blue, you’ll probably have to pause the movie for a short time to re-combobulate yourself.
From there, both Franz and Fiala start heaping on the paranoia and foreshadowing like directors possesed as the drip various unsettling factoids into your brain to clue you in that numerous things aren’t right. The main one is Grace’s background which is disturbingly filled in with grainy camcorder footage of the mass suicide that wiped out her cult in a single sitting and the sight of corpses shrouded in purple silk with tape over their mouth that read “SIN” will undoubtedly make your skin crawl like the Dickens. However, the script continues to muddy the playing field by strongly hinting that even the Hall’s might not sporting the best of mental health with Aiden proving to be violently against his father remarrying and young Mia taking to dressing up her doll in replicas of her mother’s clothes in an effort to cope. Finally there’s Richard who seems to be dealing with all the trauma he’s inadvertently causing by infuriatingly assuming that’s everything will fine and leaving such emotionally unstable people in a snowed in lodge is a perfectly sensible thing to do – seriously, the motherfucker must be colourblind what with all the red flags surrounding him that he seems to be blissfully oblivious too.
However, while some may understandably regard the actions of Richard to be highly irresponsible, it fits in perfectly when you realise that his illogical choices probably aren’t that far fetched when you consider how blind some people are to the things that are eroding under their very nose. Plus, it also adds nicely to the paranoia the movie generates, not just for its characters, but for you, the audience. If, for some reason, you haven’t come up with at least a dozen theories as to what the fuck is actually going on, then you can’t possibly be paying attention as I was coming up with a new prediction virtually every five minutes. Is something supernatural going on thanks to a faulty gas heater and an apparent time jump of around a week? Is Richard’s outright denial of the festering mental state of his loved ones part of a more sinister plan? Are the kids gaslighting Grace in a vain attempt to honor their mother? Why on earth would anyone suggest watching The Thing while stranded in a snowy wasteland?
Whatever the outcome, the movie stands proudly alongside other examinations of religion gone horribly wrong such as the aformentioned Saint Maud and other snow bound nerve janglers as it leaks menace all over the place like heated ice.
Loaded with spot-on performances (especially from Riley Keough), an ending that pounds the solar plexus and some appropriately Kubrickian imagery – the crucifix shaped building Grace envisions in the snow is as ominous a structure you’ve ever seen – The Lodge will chill you to the bone while it makes you sweat.
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