108 min | R | February 7, 2020 | Neon
Two grieving children get snowed into a remote lodge with their father’s fiancee, the lone survivor of a doomsday cult. Dad leaves for work. The storm seals the doors, and the dead are not done with anyone.
The Lodge strands a soon-to-be stepmother in a remote winter cabin with two children who blame her for their mother’s death. Grace carries her own wound. She is the lone survivor of a religious cult that ended in mass suicide. When the father leaves for work and a blizzard seals the doors, the holiday becomes a contest over who breaks first. The film is about guilt as a kind of haunting. It is about how the dead keep their grip on the living.
Riley Keough plays Grace as a woman performing normalcy over a foundation of dread. She holds herself rigid and smiles too carefully. Jaeden Martell plays Aidan with a cold calculation that reads as grief and cruelty at once. Lia McHugh plays his younger sister Mia clutching a doll that stands in for their dead mother. Richard Armitage plays their father Richard as a man who solves a family crisis by removing himself from it. Alicia Silverstone appears as Laura, the mother whose absence sets the entire tragedy in motion.
Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala direct from a script they wrote with Sergio Casci. They build the film on a single visual rhyme. Mia’s dollhouse mirrors the lodge room for room, and the camera frames the living spaces in the same flat overhead compositions. The children stop looking like people and start looking like figures someone is positioning by hand. The directors drain the color toward gray and let the snow-light flatten every surface. The frame always knows more than the characters do.
The Lodge is a precise machine built to inflict discomfort. It traps its characters inside their guilt and refuses them any exit. The craft is undeniable and the cruelty is the point. The problem is that the film treats its people as pieces in a puzzle and never warms to them enough to make the suffering land. Grace deserves more than a thesis about faith and grief. The film admires its own grim design more than it feels for the woman caught inside it.