The Lodge Movie Review: An Underrated Gem

Discussing The Lodge without spoilers is incredibly difficult, but this review will be completely spoiler free.

The basic premise of the horror movie is simple, but admittedly a little strange: two children are forced to spend the holidays with their father's girlfriend in the titular lodge during a terrible blizzard. All three of them are unhappy with an arrangement which sounds disastrous from the start, yet the girlfriend and father decide it's simply what they should do. So, we join Riley Keough in her babysitting adventure isolated in a cabin.

My biggest critique is that the writers should have decided on stronger reasoning for Keough to wind up stuck with the two children in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps it could have been a situation more like The Shining and less along the lines of "your dad said this is a good idea, so it's clearly a good idea."

Silly set-up aside, The Lodge is decent. The film longs to discuss complex subjects like religious abuse, trauma, and mental illness, and for the most part it succeeds at giving the audience enough information to be intrigued. Its characters are complicated and believable, none of them come across as entirely wicked or perfect. Everyone is human, and it's their humanity which drives the film.

Riley Keough's performance is the strongest of the bunch. She exudes agony in every moment she's on screen, struggling to entertain children who want nothing to do with her and fumbling through decorating a cold cabin for the sake of holiday cheer. Her environment begins to trigger her, and she finds herself struggling to determine the difference between reality and her own horrific nightmares.

While child actors can sometimes provide immersion-breaking bad performances in movies, The Lodge's two children do a remarkable job. The older (Jaeden Martell) was in It: Chapter One and his skills as an actor have clearly improved since then. He succeeds in his portrayal as a bitter teenage boy stuck in the presence of an adult he absolutely despises, but is being forced to respect. Together, he and Keough create dynamic scenes in a film which restricts the majority of its runtime to a single location. 

The Lodge is an incredibly effective horror movie and it's currently available for streaming on Hulu.

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