'The Lodge' film review: Isolation drama gives way to lazy high-concept horror
Despite an intriguing horror premise, "The Lodge" (opening in theaters nationwide Feb. 21) starts out with a novel idea but resorts to lazy cliches to force its “creepy” mandate.
In short: Soon-to-be stepmom Grace (Riley Keough) is snowed in with her fiancé's two children Aidan (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh) at a remote lodge. Just as relations begin to thaw between them, very strange events begin to take place. Also stars Richard Armitage and Alicia Silverstone.
The introduction is steeped in personal dread. The movie opens with a sequence where Aidan and Mia's mother is just driving them to visit their father and her estranged husband - but she's wound so tight. The audience feels the all-encompassing unease as she drives her children. As they casually play and tease eachother, she looks like she's walking into a buzzsaw. This anxiousness permeates the rest of the film, overtaking seemingly innocent scenes and injecting them with taut apprehension.
The film's commitment to its eerie atmosphere should work in its favor - but the film is heavy-handed on every front. The family suffers a shocking trauma in its opening moments, yet the script packs the rest of the story with creepy religious iconography, even creepier handmade dolls and throws in some suicide cult nonsense (just for good measure). A more confident film wouldn't feel the need to just stack creepy cliché after creepy cliché onto already pretty ambitious story with wild plot turns.
"The Lodge" really is a film split right down the middle, with its first half being quite different from its second half. Grace doesn't show up for the first twenty minutes of the film, yet her presence hangs over all the characters. Her mere existence wreaks havoc on the family. When she finally does appear, Aidan and Mia make it very clear that she is not welcome in their family. This makes for a very compelling and bleak relationship drama, tapping into a relatable resentment anyone could have toward the person they blame for the breakup of their family. Step-parents, by their very definition, are outsiders trying to join an established family - and "The Lodge" works best when it lives in the rift of alienation and contempt between Grace and the kids.
About halfway into the film, "The Lodge" takes a sharp turn, morphing from a tense family drama into something else entirely. Without spoiling anything, the movie definitely switches gears from uneasy relationship drama to psychological horror, with perhaps some supernatural underpinnings. And to be honest, the basic and general elements of the film's second half are intriguing -- the fact that they're rooted in Grace's already tenuous grasp on reality rapidly deteriorating makes the second half start out very promising.
There's just one problem with the second half of "The Lodge" - it makes no sense. Everything that happens has a clear justification for "why" events unfold - but there's simply no endgame for anything that happens in the movie's second hour. It's an idea drawn out into a second and third act, but the idea itself is half-formed and designed only to shock the audience. "The Lodge" goes to great lengths to establish everything from Grace's troubled background to the kid's antagonism toward Grace - but it makes virtually no effort to even generally explain the "to what end" of the film's second half. If a character's objectives do not make sense, their character actions do not make sense. And the entire second half of "The Lodge" entirely focuses on one party reacting to second parties specific actions -- and it's never established what the goal is. The second half of the film is watching the outcome of specific actions that lack a clear goal or grand plan.
And in a final misguided move, the film's closing moments are gratuitously and needlessly open ended. Everyone knows what happens in the next moments after the movie cuts to black - just having those events occur off-screen is not artistic or interesting. But these final moments typify "The Lodge": a movie with some intriguing ideas but lacking the confidence to realize the concept's full potential.
Final verdict: "The Lodge" leans on clichés to create mood for a movie that devolves from compelling strained relations ... to a high-concept horror plot that doesn't make sense.
