The Lodge (2020)
Directed by Severin Fiala
When a father is forced to abruptly depart for work, he leaves his children, Aidan and Mia, at their holiday home in the care of his new girlfriend, Grace. Isolated and alone, a blizzard traps them inside the lodge as terrifying events summon specters from Grace's dark past.
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What critics say influenced The Lodge
They somewhat boldly invite comparisons by invoking John Carpenter's The Thing , and what it ultimately borrows from that snowbound horror classic (more its quiet final tone than anything like gore and jump scares) might indicate how much The Lodge will or won't appeal to the tastes of the viewer.
Some healthy chunks of scenery from John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) adds to the sense of menace, paralleling the dread of chaos unfolding in an uninhabitable wintry climate (though the real purpose of these clips seems to be for a line goading the direction of the film suggesting the dangers of cabin fever).
Sergio Casci's script, written with the filmmakers, teases out uncertainties as to whether the children, Grace herself or some dreadful unseen force is responsible for the unnerving developments, throwing in playful hints of lurking evil at one point by having them watch another cabin-fever chiller, John Carpenter's The Thing , on TV, switching channels to Jack Frost just to keep us guessing.
(An argument can even be made for 1982’s The Thing, had the filmmakers not already spoon-fed the allusion for us).
Using a harsh and unforgiving landscape as the backdrop to an isolated dwelling to great effect (think: The Shining or The Thing ), directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala have made an effective follow-up to their 2014 cult hit, Goodnight Mommy .
Here the pair does not shy away from the body of “white death” horror that came before The Lodge , with eerie and sometimes humorous nods to The Thing and The Shining , among others, haunting the piece.
Anyone who has seen Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (read: everyone) knows there is nothing more terrifying than snow when combined with isolation.
The Lodge has echoes of gothic-horror drawn from a surfeit of films like The Innocents (1961), The Nightcomers (1971), Night Watch (1973), Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964), Images (1972), The Others (2001), and The Shining (1980) although these films work better as atmospheric clues to the story rather than outright references.
On an aesthetic level, The Lodge has visual poetry reminiscent of the visual poetry in The Shining.
Using a harsh and unforgiving landscape as the backdrop to an isolated dwelling to great effect (think: The Shining or The Thing ), directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala have made an effective follow-up to their 2014 cult hit, Goodnight Mommy .
Here the pair does not shy away from the body of “white death” horror that came before The Lodge , with eerie and sometimes humorous nods to The Thing and The Shining , among others, haunting the piece.
Taking cues from classic films ranging from Rebecca, to The Thing and a little The Shining sprinkled around, The Lodge is posed to be 2019’s first horror sensation.
Sure, there were the duds along the way, but for every Slender Man we got a Babadook, and every for every Vampires Suck we got a Hereditary.
At its best, the minimalist setting creates the haunting impression of “The Others” in the woods, with hints of the precise formalism that made last year’s “Hereditary” such a haunting immersion.
The eerie rhythms of the universe that gave us Deep Impact and Armageddon, Antz and A Bug’s Life, and Fyre and Fyre Fraud have conspired to make The Lodge exist in Hereditary ’s shadow, but while some tonal and iconographic similarities exist, the two films jump off their shared diving board into very different corners of the psycho-mom pool.
While the set design features an overdependence on parallels with a doll house (a la Hereditary , 2018), the early establishing characteristics work best with Silverstone’s character, a Christian woman whose skewed faith is much more perverted than the various icons and crosses decorating her exterior living spaces would suggest.
Of all of the three traumatized IT children orphan movies, it’s the most effective, recalling Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, and especially, Ari Aster’s Hereditary, due to its liberal use of miniature figures and dollhouses in the imagery.
Reminiscent of Midsommar with a critical doll house that is eerily similar to the one in Hereditary, The Lodge is a psychological horror film filled with shocking scenes that keeps the audience on the edge of their seat with their head buried in their shirt.
Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz directed the 2014 gem, Goodnight Mommy, a deeply unsettling inversion of the horror genre.
There is a recognizable borrowed textures between this and directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s previous feature Goodnight Mommy .
Following their German-language directorial debut Goodnight Mommy, the duo make a seamless transition into English, and they make it easy to fall in love with their meticulous work.
Co-written and directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz (Goodnight Mommy), from a screenplay by Sergio Casci (The Caller), The Lodge quietly descends into that cold, blustery darkness; a barrelling steam train of harrowing destruction.
Your heart kind of sinks for writer-directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (Goodnight Mommy) in the opening moments of The Lodge, which include an empty interior that turns out to be a dollhouse, a frantic mother, and a head stuck out a car window.
Reexamining similar themes of the inherent madness of isolation and the potential terrors of motherhood from their breakout 2014 debut Goodnight Mommy , Austrian directing duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala move into English language territory with The Lodge .
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Franz and Fiala achieve this through an immersive sound design, droning music and the heavy blues, grays and browns evoked by the claustrophobic camerawork of DP Thimios Bakatakis, who shot Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
Accomplished cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis, who shot Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer , shapes another forbidding canvas of gloom and shadow, pierced by interludes of startling luminosity.
There’s a clinical effect to their visuals that recalls Yorgos Lanthimos ( The Lobster , The Favourite ), as characters are framed against sparse backgrounds, and the camera lingers on awful sights.
The script does a decent job at connecting the dots, but at the end of the day, the biggest help here is Thimios Bakatakis’s (The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) cinematography.
From the arrival scene at the lodge which cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis ("The Lobster") has composed to mimic the Overlook Hotel in miniature to the roving through the rooms of a creepy dollhouse which seems to foretell the future, one continually notes references to better horror films.
Religious iconography, theistic guilt, and spiritual loneliness are all major themes, and the final product has shadows of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman In the Dunes.
At its best, the minimalist setting creates the haunting impression of “The Others” in the woods, with hints of the precise formalism that made last year’s “Hereditary” such a haunting immersion.
The Lodge has echoes of gothic-horror drawn from a surfeit of films like The Innocents (1961), The Nightcomers (1971), Night Watch (1973), Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964), Images (1972), The Others (2001), and The Shining (1980) although these films work better as atmospheric clues to the story rather than outright references.
Directors Franz and Fiala (along with their scriptwriting partner Sergio Casci) drop in a tribute to John Carpenter’s “The Thing” and appear to be fans of the aforementioned “The Shining” and “The Others,” among other horror classics, judging by certain plot elements and visual references.
At one point the characters themselves seem to stop just short of invoking the plot of “The Others,” a horror picture they may have seen once upon a happier time.
Even by genre film standards, what goes on here requires so many lapses of logic, starting with the half-assed explanation required to get Richard out of the house (not to mention the icky fact that he first met Grace while researching the story of her father’s cult for a book), that the screenplay by Fiala, Franz and Sergio Casci feels more like a lazy and increasingly half-assed attempt to rehash elements of “The Shining,” “The Others” and “Hereditary” than anything else and while they do manage to generate a convincingly frigid atmosphere, they don’t do much of anything with it.
“The Lodge,” which climbs from low-level melancholy to all-out hysteria, tips its hat to several predecessors, “Hereditary,” “The Shining” and “The Others” among them.
The Lodge has echoes of gothic-horror drawn from a surfeit of films like The Innocents (1961), The Nightcomers (1971), Night Watch (1973), Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964), Images (1972), The Others (2001), and The Shining (1980) although these films work better as atmospheric clues to the story rather than outright references.
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The Lodge has echoes of gothic-horror drawn from a surfeit of films like The Innocents (1961), The Nightcomers (1971), Night Watch (1973), Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964), Images (1972), The Others (2001), and The Shining (1980) although these films work better as atmospheric clues to the story rather than outright references.
The Lodge has echoes of gothic-horror drawn from a surfeit of films like The Innocents (1961), The Nightcomers (1971), Night Watch (1973), Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964), Images (1972), The Others (2001), and The Shining (1980) although these films work better as atmospheric clues to the story rather than outright references.