The Lodge, the latest offering from the slowly resurgent Hammer Films, opens up with a bang. A literal one. Focusing on the decayed marriage of Richard (Richard Armitage) and Laura (Alicia Silverstone), the former tells the latter that he plans to marry the young woman he recently wrote a book about (Riley Keough), which in turns causes Laura to enter a spiral that leads to her taking her own life. This all occurs within less than 10 minutes of The Lodge‘s running time. It’s the sort of shock to your senses that leads you to think you’re about to watch something really special within the genre.
Coming from the filmmakers behind the Austrian horror feature Goodnight Mommy (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala), a film I liked but did not love, this promising start gives way to the idea that The Lodge could be in line with the kind of daring, upending of expectations that has marked this current era of “elevated horror”, a term I’m on record as hating, but it’s clear that Franz and Fiala have the same raw material that falls alongside new masters like Eggers and Kent. They also have similar predilections of pacing, where they are not at all afraid of lingering on one shot or scene beyond the typical needs of horror-goers attention spans.
But where does The Lodge go after such an immediate jolt? Well, it all starts to feel a little too familiar..you see, Richard has two children, and his grand plan after Laura’s suicide, is to help his two kids (Jaiden Martell and Lia McHugh) connect a bit better with his new bride to be. He concocts a trip to a remote cabin up in the snowy north, where everyone gets a chance to get to know one another and become a big happy family. Putting aside just how awful this plan is on its face, and what a dope Richard really is, I failed to mention the kicker: his new beloved, Grace, is the lone surviving member of a suicide cult. And now you know why he wrote a book about her. His kids Aidan and Mia certainly are no strangers to that fact.
Once they all get up to the cabin, Richard reveals that he has to head out on a work trip, and he leaves the trio (and Grace’s dog) in the cabin to really dig in with one another. I bet you figure they instantly get along and welcome Grace right into their familial unit! Oh, you don’t? Well, you guessed right. Indeed, things don’t go according to plan at all, and it all starts with a power outage, and then a dwindling food supply, and then a fraying mental state giving way to very bad things indeed.
When you put it down on paper, it all sounds like quite a time! But there’s some deeply entrenched problems with The Lodge, one of which being, a lot of it frankly feels like a retread of their last feature, all the way down to the setup of a woman at odds with two children and the sense that something is not quite what it seems with one side of the equation. There’s an argument to be made that these two films are in dialogue with one another to an extent, but that doesn’t really come to bear in any real way on screen and once The Lodge has wrapped it just leads you to wonder if this filmmaking duo only has one idea in their approach to horror.
Of course, recycling of basic premises and setups can be fine if the final output is entertaining, but on that score this efforts fails to make a mark, with an overwhelming sense of tedium continuing to build even as the situation spirals out of control. Franz and Fiala spark The Lodge with so little life at all, that even scenes that are intended to inflict horror upon viewers just feel laborious. And it’s peppered with a twist that’s so predictable, you’ll have seen it coming an hour in, further undercutting any inherent small victories that could be on offer here.
I’ll give credit where credit is due, the final shots are pretty good, and produce the sort of haunting imagery that much of the rest of the script was crying out for. There’s also some really good, creepy cult videos that the children watch. I wish that ominous approach had more informed the direction of the film in general. As it stands, The Lodge is mostly just a bore.