The Lodge and Missed Potential
This analysis fully spoils The Lodge (2019) and mentions suicide. Viewer discretion is advised. The movie is worth a watch, so please support it!
The Lodge (2019), directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, opens on a suicide, which is a symbolically fascinating choice. Rather, it may be an indication of a movie that kills twice-told genre tropes in an attempt to be reborn anew. Its rebirth, however, fails, and the film lays trapped in a cold purgatory.
The oppressively dark atmosphere is a treat. Every inch of this film is dripping with cabin fever, a primal fear of the cold and need for warmth. The suggestion that the protagonist, Grace, is trapped in a state between life and death, is accompanied by camerawork that lingers, as if it was a spirit between realms. The darkness is to suggest shapes, and the film seeps its paranoia into the viewer. It has suggestions and teases of truths and lies, all woven beautifully into a tapestry that leads into something both interesting and
The film brazenly subverts the typical horror trope where the characters were dead or in purgatory, instead showing it as a prank of children who think there was a connection between their mother’s suicide and Grace being the survivor of a cult. They then torture her, by taking her meds and emptying the house of most items. I enjoyed this element, and believe it’s the strongest element of the movie. It takes the wind out of the movie’s sails, twisting it towards the direction of a dark thriller rather than a horror movie, and, besides the still-slow camerawork, it works perfectly. The issue comes with what happens after the twist: We move point of view to the children, following them in every scene after the reveal, while our protagonist is a catatonic husk. In the climatic ending, she seemingly reverts back to her training as a cult member, and murders her fiance, and the movie ends before we see what happens to the children. The ending falls back into the tropes it tried to subvert. It ends being a limp horror movie, relying on a mentally ill woman, literally off her meds, to deliver scares. The bittersweet note of missed potential haunts The Lodge worse than any specter could.
