The Lodge Is the Years First Great Horror Movie – Vogue

And finally: We have the first good horror film of 2020. For those of us who like to see something scary in theaters, January flickers with false promise. The dumping ground of Hollywood, it always offers a few horror titles amid the wreckage. Gretel & Hansel? The Turning? The Grudge? None of them worked.

But now we have The Lodge, out on Friday, a snowbound chamber piece about two kids spending a winter holiday in a cabin with their fathers mysterious new girlfriend, Grace (Riley Keough). Directed by the Austrian pair Veronika Franz and Severin Fialaknown for another memorable horror chamber piece, 2014s Goodnight MommyThe Lodge is a slow-burn genre exercise that exerts the pressure of a steel vise.

It begins with Alicia Silverstone, of all people. Her face drained of all of that Clueless pep, Silverstone plays Laura, the mother of teenage Aidan (Jaeden Martell) and 11-year-old Mia (Lia McHugh), barely holding on in the wake of a split from her husband, Richard (Richard Armitage). Dropping off her kids at Richards house, she learns that he is once and for all moving on with his new girlfriendand lets just say she doesnt take the news well. The Lodge thus starts with a frightening jolt, before it propels us into the snowbound wilderness.

Richard is forging ahead with a vacation with Aidan and Miaand the eerily quiet Grace. Their destination is an isolated lake house, tucked snug in snowdrifts. (The filmmakers shot on location in Quebec.) Its a place Richard and Laura enjoyed with the kids, who are now stone-faced at the prospect of sharing it with Grace. Thats because shes not just a mother surrogate but also a young woman with a secret. Via a bit of snooping on his fathers notes (hes a journalist, working on a book about cults), Aidan discovers that Grace is the sole surviving member of a religious doomsday cult.

Keough is capable of wild, showy performancesI still remember the feral energy she gave to 2016s American Honeybut here she keeps herself at a controlled, eerie simmer. Grace seems absurdly young to play stepmother to these kids, and anyway she cant quite rise to the occasionespecially on an ice skating expedition that goes predictably wrong. Back in the house, she downs pills in secret and fends off disquieting visions from her past. When Richard is suddenly (and rather implausibly) called away for a work emergency, she assures him that she can take care of the kids by herself. Stone-faced, Aidan and Mia watch their father depart.

The Lodge flips the trope of the evil stepmother on its head: What if the innocent-seeming children are the ones up to no good? To reveal more would be to ruin the twists and turns in store. Not all of which, I must admit, made perfect sense to me. But The Lodge is less about a cleverly constructed plot than a mood of claustrophobic unease. When the power goes out and the taps run dry, the house becomes a haunted playground of cold shadows and aquarium light.

The film recalls 2018s Hereditary in more than one respect (a dollhouse also plays an unsettling role here), but The Lodge never goes batshit like that memorably disturbing film did. Franz and Fiala are more interested in plunging you into the midst of Graces psychological breakdown, while children engage in minor-key cruelty. Its a film about the durability of trauma, loaded with frighting visions of Graces past and a world-class ending sceneI wouldnt dream of giving it awaythat clings to you like a chill.

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The Lodge Is the Years First Great Horror Movie - Vogue

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero