Fitted with eerie imagery and a perplexing yet interesting plot, Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s The Lodge succeeds at engaging moviegoers despite occasionally being too ambitious for its own good.
The Lodge follows siblings Aiden (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh) as they spend the holidays at the family’s remote getaway with their father (Richard Armitage) and their soon-to-be stepmom Grace (Riley Keough). After their father heads into town for work, the kids and Grace are snowed in together and things start to take a strange and weird turn for the worse.
The film is the peak of slow-burns— including little to no actual jump scares. Instead, Fiala and Franz focus on the eeriness of music, loud sounds and subtle but intentional camera shots to induce paranoia upon viewers. Similarly, it seems the director duo’s aim wasn’t necessarily to scare the audience silly, but to more so perplex the hell out of them with their bonkers yet enthralling plot twists and turns.
Severin and Fiala are most notable for their Austrian horror film, Goodnight Mommy. Both The Lodge and Goodnight Mommy, while completely different in plot, have the same underlying premise: pitting kids and adults against each other. Throughout the entirety of Goodnight Mommy, audiences wonder whether the mother or the kids are the bad guy. With The Lodge, it’s equally as hard to pinpoint whether or not Grace or Aidan and Mia are the bad guys.
What makes The Lodge so different from past works the directors is that the film plays into many horror film tropes. Whether it be the completely overdone angle of cults like Midsommar, the isolation that comes from winter and ski lodges in films such as The Shining or the creepiness of dolls and dollhouses seen in films like Annabelle or Hereditary, Severin and Franz include it all.
Though the inclusion of these tropes could come off as cliche or overdone, somehow the duo make it work. Throughout the film’s roughly 100 minute run time, there’s never really a moment where things drag on. While the seemingly never ending days in the lodge may seem redundant to some, the puzzling plot and need to figure out what is happening overrides that.
The Lodge isn’t necessarily setting out to become the next big blockbuster in horror. The film prides itself on containing a chilling score, beautiful cinematography and camera work, stark and captivating performances and more. Severin and Fiala are ambitious with the story they’re trying to tell, but with a somber ending that is sure to have audiences talking, it’s more than apparent they’ve succeeded.
