Die Reviews klingen alle sehr interessant, danke für's Posten der ganzen Bilder und Infos, Laudine.
Wenn ich nur nicht so furchtsam wäre... Am besten wäre ein Groupwatch im Kino, mit großen Kissen...

‘The Lodge’ Review: A Chilling Family Nightmare with ‘The Shining’ Vibes | Sundance 2019
by Perri Nemiroff January 31, 2019


If you’ve seen Goodnight Mommy, you know directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala have a penchant for infusing a sinister twist when digging into the complications of troubled families, and their new feature, The Lodge, is no different.

The movie stars Jaeden Lieberher and Lia McHugh as Aidan and Mia. After the passing of their mother (Alicia Silverstone) they’re sent to live with their father (Richard Armitage) and eventually, he insists they spend quality time with his girlfriend Grace (Riley Keough). All four drive off to the family’s remote cottage where Grace continues her attempt to win over the kids. When their dad has to return to the city for work, Grace agrees to keep an eye on Aidan and Mia while he’s gone. All is well and safe enough until a nasty snow storm blows through and traps the trio in the cottage as strange and eerie things start to occur.

At the start, the driving force of this movie is Aidan and Mia, and Lieberher and McHugh make an impeccable pair. Lieberher already has a wildly impressive resume including It and Midnight Special where it’s abundantly clear that he’s able to elevate what’s on the page, turning his characters into complete people with a significant amount of history in tow. And in the case of The Lodge, that history sparks an extremely believable and moving attachment to both his mother and his sister, as well as a deep seeded resentment for Grace.

Mia carries similar feelings for Grace, but her different approach to navigating that relationship adds a fascinating complexity to the situation. Whereas Aidan draws a clear line, Mia is younger and far more impressionable. She’s loyal to her big brother, respects him and listens to him, but some simple kindness from Grace can go a longer way with Mia. There isn’t a moment of The Lodge when you’re not meant to expect that something odd is going on with Grace, but the focus here is two kids who recently had their beloved mother ripped away from them; when Grace makes a seemingly genuine effort, it’s only natural to find some solace in the kids having a potential mother figure again.

Further putting you on edge as all of this plays out is Keough’s disturbingly impressive performance, something that takes center stage when a subtle change in point-of-view takes place. Grace grew up with strict religious pressures and still carries the demons of her past with her. Things get dark to say the least, but there are also a number of moments with sincere warmth and kindness that suggest she really is trying to move on, like how she treats her dog and also numerous attempts to bond with the kids including going iceskating and decorating the house for Christmas. But almost every effort ends in disaster and hostility, and as the snow storm further traps her and her sources of comfort become threatened, Grace starts showing signs of becoming increasingly unhinged, and when that really kicks in, Keough’s work is precise, unforgettable and appropriately nightmarish.

While Goodnight Mommy is an extremely well-crafted film, I had figured out exactly what was going on in that movie a little too soon for my liking. With The Lodge, however, Franz and Fiala got me. There’s a quality to the atmosphere in the movie that prohibits you from taking a step back and assessing the big picture. Instead, you feel the severe isolation of the location of the cottage, you’re further boxed into the small home by the storm, and then on top of that, the visuals and plot progression encourage a frantic search for answers while observing Mia, Aidan and Grace’s behavior.

The Lodge doesn’t give you a moment to thaw. Even during the aforementioned ice skating scene, Franz and Fiala seemingly want you to know that danger looms. And the choice to open the movie with an unshakable sequence featuring Silverstone immediately sets that tone. The directing duo keeps you firmly on your toes by creating a constant sense of unease but also draws you in using three fully realized characters who are in desperate need of a stable family. Between the chilly setting, how the camera maneuvers through the home, and also how inner demons manifest and threaten to consume a family whole, The Lodge is quite reminiscent of the threat lurking in The Shining. It’s a relentless, mind-bending psychological nightmare in which the threat of demons from one’s past are always lurking.

Grade: A-

The Lodge does not currently have a release date, but Neon secured the rights to the film during the festival.

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'The Lodge': Film Review | Sundance 2019

12:09 PM PST 1/28/2019 by David Rooney

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Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Cabin fever on ice. TWITTER
Riley Keough plays a damaged young woman stuck in a snowbound house with her partner's hostile children in 'Goodnight Mommy' directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's atmospheric chiller.

Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's first narrative feature, Goodnight Mommy, was like an Architectural Digest version of a cabin-in-the-woods horror movie, with young twin brothers turning malevolent on the woman they believe has taken their mother's place. The Austrian directing team's English-language debut, The Lodge, puts another pair of siblings with a possibly vindictive purpose in another isolated house, where they play their part in the steady unraveling of their father's new fiancee. However, while the filmmakers' control of mood, menacing atmosphere and unsettling spatial dynamics remains arresting, their story sense grows shaky in a chiller that starts out strong but becomes meandering and repetitive.

The precision craft and sober intelligence on display in this Neon acquisition out of the Sundance Midnight section nonetheless should stoke curiosity among a discerning genre audience, along with a central performance from Riley Keough that keeps you wondering about the extent to which this childhood trauma survivor is victim or aggressor. The opening 15 minutes alone is must-see stuff.

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. The movie begins with a clever visual trick that catches the audience by surprise, slow-panning with a baleful gaze around the rooms of a timber-lined house before pulling back to reveal the setup as something else entirely. That it's almost identical to a device used in last year's Hereditary doesn't make it less effective, especially once we later see the structure replicated elsewhere.

The gasp-inducing scene that follows soon after conveys that we're in the hands of filmmakers who know exactly how and when to deploy a sudden shock. Though their parsimoniousness in that area becomes something of an issue.

Teenage Aiden (Jaeden Martell) and his younger sister Mia (Lia McHugh) stubbornly reject the attempts of their father, Richard (Richard Armitage), to make them accept his new fiancee, Grace (Keough), whose story was featured in a book he wrote about evangelical religious cults. Both kids are fiercely loyal to their loving mother, Laura (Alicia Silverstone), left behind by Richard. But when their dad suggests a Christmas retreat at the family's lakeside lodge in the mountains, giving Grace some bonding time with the children while he returns to the city to wrap up work, they have no choice but to go along. Of course, that doesn't mean they have to play nice.

'The Lodge'
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Sundance: Riley Keough Horror Film 'The Lodge' Sells to Neon

Franz and Fiala knowingly toy with horror tropes, for instance when the fractured family unit arrives at the lodge and they go ice-skating on the frozen lake. It's clear something bad is going to happen, though exactly what remains unpredictable until the moment it occurs, with seeds of doubt planted as to whether it was a complete accident or somehow orchestrated.

With that near-tragedy out of the way, the interactions between Grace and the sullen kids are just the average headaches of many soon-to-be-stepmothers — she attempts to befriend them while they respond with an unrelenting cold shoulder, ignoring her invitation to help with the holiday decorations and declining even to let her fix them snacks. Mia seems likely to thaw first, but there are thorns on her olive branch when she offers to show Grace the Christmas gift she and Aiden have made for their father. That Aiden's animosity toward Grace may contain hints of sexual attraction is merely one more reason for the outsider to keep reaching for her anti-anxiety meds.

The less audiences know about what follows the better, but as things start going wrong with the house, supplies begin mysteriously disappearing and contact with the outside world is cut off, the wounds of increasingly unstable Grace's past are reopened in vivid hallucinations, often while she's sleepwalking. 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.

All this is very artfully done, with Bakatakis' camera becoming a pernicious eye (what he can suggest with a simple corridor or staircase-landing shot is frightening), and the needling score of Daniel Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans layering unease into every scene. The restraint of Franz and Fiala in refusing to indulge in the usual jump scares and jarring sound effects is admirable in theory, but this is a movie that could have used more aggressive assaults on our nerves as it builds to its gruesome climax, with another cold dispatch to mirror the brutal blow of the opening. While The Lodge is filled with haunting images — a disoriented Grace waking up in a vast expanse of snow, or gazing out from a misted window at an evenly patterned field of snow-angel imprints, like the wintry version of crop circles — it becomes a little ponderous and wearing.

Still, this is classy, intelligent horror, and the actors keep you watching, especially Keough, who goes all in with fanatical-evangelical whack-job fervor once Grace becomes convinced of her need to repent and atone, impulses fed by the religious artifacts left in the house by the kids' mother. (The actress' father, Danny Keough, also pops up as an unwelcome specter from her past.)

Armitage is solid, if sidelined for much of the action, while Silverstone leaves a lingering impression in her brief scenes. McHugh nicely balances the suggestion of some more sinister intent beneath her preteen innocence, constantly clutching dolls that figure in the plot in ways that could be interpreted as either a reflection or a subversive influence on what's occurring. And fans of 2017 horror blockbuster It will derive pleasure from seeing Martell (credited in that earlier film as Jaeden Lieberher) in another creepy scenario, this time where he may be as much creating the danger as susceptible to it.

Production companies: Hammer, FilmNation Entertainment
Distributor: Neon
Cast: Riley Keough, Jaeden Martell, Lia McHugh, Richard Armitage, Alicia Silverstone, Danny Keough
Directors: Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala
Screenwriters: Sergio Casci, Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala
Producers: Simon Oakes, Aliza James, Aaron Ryder
Executive producers: Ben Browning, Alison Cohen, Milan Popelka, Brad Zimmerman, Marc Schipper, Xavier Marchand
Director of photography: Thimios Bakatakis
Production designer: Sylvain Lamaitre
Costume designer: Sophie Lefebvre
Music: Daniel Bensi, Saunder Jurriaans
Editor: Michael Palm
Casting: Dixie Chassay
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Midnight)
Sales: Endeavor Content

100 minutes

sundance 2019 Jan. 29, 2019

The Lodge Is an Unsettling Up-Is-Down Horror Tale

By Emily Yoshida
Sundance 2019

In The Lodge, faith is a kind of Chekhov’s gun, a potentially game-changing tool just lying there, waiting to be picked up by the wrong person. The faith in this case is of the Christian variety, and two mother figures — one straight-laced Catholic, the other a survivor of an Evangelical death cult — battle for control over it in the minds of their children. (It certainly adds to the tension that there is an actual gun in the scene as well.) As a psychological down-is-up horror movie, The Lodge has a few solid tricks up its sleeve. But when the smoke and mirrors clear, it’s ultimately a story about trauma, and a rather bleak one at that.

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. 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.

After a horrific opening gotcha to make sure you’re awake and paying attention, the film picks up with brother and sister Aidan (Jaeden Lieberher) and Mia (Lia McHugh) grieving the death of their mother Laura (Alicia Silverstone) and stubbornly refusing to meet their father Richard’s (Richard Armitage) girlfriend. They blame Grace (Riley Keough) for their mother’s suicide; she and their father had been separated for several years, but Laura killed herself the day he announced that he intended to remarry. Laura had an ardent Catholic faith, and the children hang on to her memory with equal fervor; Mia’s doll becomes a talisman of sorts for her memory. But, being children, they are eventually forced to spend Christmas at the family’s mountain lodge with their father and stepmom-to-be. We see them pack, all the essentials — sweaters, long johns … candles? Sea monkeys? — and hit the road.

They have extra reason to be worried about Grace, especially after Googling her. Grace was made famous in the news as an adolescent, having been the only survivor of a cult suicide, and meant to spread the group’s apocalyptic message to the world. She seems perfectly nice in person, and even has a cute little dog that she brings along, but when we see her alone with Richard, she exhibits some signs of anxiety, and depends on a bottle of pills to keep her mental state regulated. She seems especially uneasy around the crosses left around the house by the late Laura, and a painting of the Virgin Mary in the dining room. Then Richard is called back to the city for work, and Grace and the children are left alone in the middle of nowhere, as a blizzard hits and snows them in.

You may think you can guess where this film is going based on that description, but the interesting trick Fiala and Franz pull lies in a subtle shift in perspective. There’s no one moment in which it happens, but once we’re at the lodge, we soon realize that we’re watching things unfold from Grace’s point of view, and the children are the hostile forces with her in the house. When the power goes out and their belongings and provisions disappear, it doesn’t take long for some people’s grip on reality — including ours — to start slipping. As both the closest thing we have to a surrogate, and someone we’re not sure if we can trust ourselves, Keough’s performance walks a tricky line skillfully.

The Lodge’s final reveal may feel like a bit of a deflation after all of the ominous elements it’s thrown together. Without giving away too much, it does feel as if Grace’s and Laura’s religion is a mere spooky prop for Fiala and Franz, an aesthetic theme to add mood and atmosphere to the increasingly desperate conditions in the house. But take away the religious themes and you still have an effectively chilling tale about how past experiences stay buried within us, and can never fully be defused.

Sundance 2019: The Lodge, Memory – The Origins of Alien, Little Monsters

by Brian Tallerico
January 29, 2019

Horror is in a creatively robust periods with films like “Hereditary” and “Get Out” crossing the line that separates genre and “serious fare” (for those who make such distinctions). The Midnight section at Sundance has been a bit lackluster in recent years (with some striking exceptions like the aforementioned Ari Aster flick, “Mandy” and “The Babadook”) but 2019 came roaring back, illustrating the resurgence and depth of what this genre is providing nowadays. From a documentary to a mood piece to an action film, this was one of Sundance 2019’s strongest programs and one of the best Midnight sections I’ve ever seen at any festival. People were buzzing about titles and studios were snatching them up, realizing that horror is a critical and commercial leader right now.

The best of the midnights I’ve seen so far is “The Lodge,” from the directors of the unsettling “Goodnight Mommy,” Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. They’re working once again in that deeply uneasy register, and working once again with that fraught dynamic between children and parents—well, in this case, a potential stepparent. With elements of the snowed-in insanity of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” this atmospheric mindf**k was one of the most divisive movies of Sundance 2019, drawing raves and pans in equal measure. I’m a fan.

From the opening scenes, Franz and Fiala drench “The Lodge” in looming dread. They have the nerve to open with a series of Chekhov’s gun images, including a literal weapon on a table, only to reveal that they’re miniatures in a large doll house in the home of kids Aidan (Jaeden Lieberher) and Mia (Lia McHugh). Their parents Richard (Richard Armitrage) and Laura (Alicia Silverstone) are going through a divorce and Richard has taken up with Grace (Riley Keough), the only surviving member of a doomsday cult that recently committed mass suicide. While writing about the cult, Richard met Grace, and left Laura. The kids do not like Grace. In an effort to do something to bring the family together, Richard brings the quartet to a remote Northwest cabin for Christmas, but he has to go back to town for a few days. The kids will get closer to Grace. What could go wrong?

Shot on film by cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis (a regular Yorgos Lanthimos collaborator on films like “The Lobster” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”), “The Lodge” has an oppressive, striking visual style. Every element of the design team works together to create a nerve-rattling mood. You can feel the rush of cold coming through the window as snow buffets the house. There’s a sense of danger in every scene, and a danger created not narratively as much as it is through the film’s visual language and sound design. The film works on levels of discomfort – the one with a new stepparent, the one with an imposing storm outside, the one created by isolation, and, oh, the one from the only adult in the house going crazy.

A lot of “The Lodge” relies on what could be called “things real people don’t do,” but horror has a long history of exaggerating human behavior in mood pieces, which this most definitely is. Don’t come into it trying to break down the plot’s inconsistencies, just give yourself over to what it does to you with its foreboding imagery, and the unsettling performance from the great Riley Keough, who makes Grace a fascinatingly elusive character. Does Grace seem a bit odd because we’re seeing her through the children’s POV? Because of her dark background? Because of her anxiety over being a sudden mother? Although Keough is smart enough to not play her as a pure question mark, grounding her while also leaving enough open to make her fascinating.

“The Lodge” is a truly unsettling movie, the kind of horror film that rattles you on an almost subconscious level, making you more uncomfortable than going for cheap scares. Don’t ask questions or dissect the believability of the plot. Just check in.

The Midnights programs this year started on opening night with a unique choice – a film that isn’t scary in its own right but dives deep into the history and impact of one of the scariest films of all time, the masterpiece that is “Alien.” As he did recently for “Psycho” in the interesting “78/52,” Alexandre O. Philippe dissects Ridley Scott’s masterpiece in “Memory – The Origins of Alien,” focusing as heavily on the infamous chestburster scene as he did Hitchcock’s shower scene in his last documentary. Philippe’s film deftly details not only how and why that scene works narratively but breaks down the visual language of it too, allowing even fans of “Alien” to see its brilliance from every angle.

“Memory” also provides something I love in documentaries about classic films and that’s the sense that “Alien” was something of a perfect storm of talents coming to the same project at the same time. What if Dan O’Bannon hadn’t written the 29-page script for “Memory,” which would later be renamed “Alien” and retain nearly the identical same opening pages? What if Walter Hill had stayed on the project and not ceded way for Ridley Scott to take over? What if H.R. Giger was never involved? And Philippe not only makes clear how each of these gentlemen impacted the final product but how much “Alien” incorporates a long history before them, including comics that inspired O’Bannon, H.P. Lovecraft, The Furies, and even O’Bannon’s own Crohn’s Disease.

You probably know how that last element impacted “Alien,” and Philippe spends a great deal of time breaking down why the chestburster scene is so effective, even noting elements of its visual language that I had never caught (and I’ve seen it at least a dozen times over my life). It’s a movie made by someone who loves his subject matter but it’s also way more than mere fandom. It’s doesn’t just remind you that “Alien” is a masterpiece but details how it got that way and why it continues to haunt us.

No one will ever use the word masterpiece to describe Abe Forsythe’s “Little Monsters,” but the Midnight Premiere audience on Sunday night ate it up to the point that Neon ran out and bought it. I can see why. It’s the kind of bloody, raunchy, silly thing that slays with people willing to stay up until 2 in the morning to watch a zombie flick. In the light of day, it’s a little more flawed than I was hoping, but its leading lady keeps the project moving, and fans of movies that feature brain-eating lurchers should be entertained.

Given how much this horror-comedy was inspired by George A. Romero and Peter Jackson, one could call it “Field Trip of the Dead,” as the majority of the film takes place on a school trip to an amusement park that happens to be next to a military testing facility. Dave (Alexander England), a slacker who has just broken up with his girlfriend, accompanies his nephew Felix on the date after he catches a glimpse of his teacher, Miss Caroline (Lupita Nyong’o), a gorgeous young lady who sings Taylor Swift on her ukulele and inspires her students. They’re all headed to play putt-putt and even catch a glimpse of a celebrity on the pre-school scene on his world tour, the aggressively grating Teddy McGiggle (Josh Gad). And then the experiments at the testing facility break out and start craving human flesh.

Nyong’o wonderfully captures the spirit of a woman who knows her job is not only to protect her students but to convince them that this is all a game. They conga line through the zombies – thank God these are the “slow ones” – and huddle in a gift shop, hatching an escape plan between singing songs with the kids. Nyong’o really can do absolutely anything, segueing seamlessly from comedy to drama to horror in her career. She’s charming here and anchors the movie. England is remarkably annoying at first – the movie takes too long to get to the gift shop – but his character has a redemption arc, and he ultimately grew on me. Gad is in full-blown Gad Mode, but the awfulness of his character is intentional this time. Ultimately, “Little Monsters” may not live up to the Romero/Jackson films that influenced it, but it’s a reasonably enjoyable zombie flick. Well, depending on the time of day you see it.

Sundance 2019: The Lodge Review

By Jason Gorber January 28, 2019 | 1:10 pm

Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala have crafted a unique filmmaking partnership, crafting films of supreme precision and acerbic tone. Their 2014 film Goodnight Mommy was a clinical look at family dysfunctionality, its white-walled clarity belying inner turmoil where the manicured perfection is belied by the messiness of humanity. With The Lodge they explore a similar landscape, this time fields of white snow and ice contrasting with the seeming comfort of a wood-lined cottage that evokes feelings of warmth and comfort while equally evoking coffin-like claustrophobia.

The Lodge is essentially a family drama, where a pair of children (played by Lia McHugh and Jaeden Lieberher) are witness to the disintegration of a marriage between their mother (Alicia Silverstone) and father (Richard Armitage). When they move in with their dad they confront his new partner Grace (Riley Keough), and as a family they head out into the country for some holiday cheer.

Grace’s past trauma informs much of her reticence, while the children too are scarred by what’s come before. What results is a game of wills that has truly macabre consequences, blurring lines between victim and victimization with horrific results.

While events proceed deliberately, the narrative evolves with a precise intensity that serves the story well, mirroring the bleak yet inviting visuals of its lonely locale.

This film brilliantly eschews easy calls to supernaturalism, finding humanity itself perfectly capable of soul destroying behaviour without need to assign blame to something metaphysical. It’s this element that truly makes the film exceptional, yet at the same time may disappoint genre junkies who wish things to conform more readily to their expectations for more heightened narratives. For those patient enough, and willing to take the film by its own rules, The Lodge succeeds in ways like few others.

There are echoes to many masterpieces from the likes of Hitchcock and Kubrick, with its visual style particularly redolent of the latter thanks to long-time Yorgos Lanthimos collaborator Thimios Bakatakis’ icy photography. There are zeitgeist allusions to last year’s Hereditary, with similar dioramic elements that connect the children’s play world with the events of reality, yet the films take very different tacks as they reach their conclusions.

Given that The Lodge is a modern Hammer production it’s perhaps even more ironic it doesn’t reach for many of the tropes that fueled that famed studio’s output, where there’s no need here for another Wicker Man spurt of otherworldly madness to elicit our fears. The Lodge wisely draws upon many of the tropes and expected plot elements and twists them gently, revising our expectations throughout.

The performances are exceptional, particularly from the young children and their interaction with a growingly unstable Keough. Armitage exudes parental calm, a perfect casting that helps subvert the notion of the strong and capable father figure.

The Lodge is above all a character piece, using elements of fear and dread drawn from a myriad of horror sources to result in an exercise in domestic destruction. Its affect is all the more powerful because of its focus upon these flawed human characters, illustrating how evil’s banality is far more chilling than any call to the demonic or supernatural. We’re treated to a work whose very restraint is its biggest gift, holding back any methods that let us escape form the realization that families can be destroyed by nothing other than the tools we have within.

As an English language debut Franz and Fiala have overcome all the pitfalls that often are encountered with the switch is made by international filmmakers. The script is taut and the language precise, all the more remarkable given that drafts of the film went through back-and-forth translation between English and German throughout. The end result is a works that shows none of these seams, resulting in a new classic for this kind of thriller.

With affecting performances, exceptional photography, a haunting score and a storyline that eats at you throughout, The Lodge is an extraordinary work by a talented group. Franz and Fiala have crafted a bone-chilling film that’s a slow burn, its icy flames illuminating the dark crevices of human behaviour, resulting in a work not easily forgotten.

The Lodge – UK/USA, 2019
27 January, 2019

The Lodge is a 2019 British-American horror thriller feature film directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz (The Field Guide to Evil‘Die Trud’; Goodnight Mommy) from a screenplay co-written with Sergio Casci. The FilmNation Entertainment-Hammer Films production stars Richard Armitage, Riley Keough, Alicia Silverstone and Jaeden Lieberher.

Plot:

A soon-to-be-stepmom is snowed in with her fiancé’s two children at a remote holiday village. Just as relations finally begin to thaw between the trio, strange and frightening events threaten to summon psychological demons from her strict religious childhood…

Reviews:

“The Lodge starts subtle, with vexing sound design and a few eerie shots (hanging turkeys, black balloons, a screaming face frozen on the TV), but on a dime, it spirals into outright insanity, taking turn after shocking turn, leaving the audience out of breath and praying for a reprieve.” Meredith Borders, Bloody Disgusting

“Watching The Lodge, it’s easy to relate to that feeling of entrapment. That’s a credit to the movie’s claustrophobic tendencies at its high points, but as it continues along an aimless trajectory, “The Lodge” proves that even horrible events can be a deadly bore.” Eric Kohn, IndieWire

“Directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz build a tense atmosphere that’s filled with trepidation and dread, making tremendous use of the claustrophobic setting (and the creepiest dollhouses you’ve ever seen) to mirror not only the woman’s slide into madness but also that of the kids. The performances are effective…” Louisa Moore, Screen Zealots

Release:

The Lodge premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 25 January 2019. NEON has since acquired the distribution with a theatrical release planned for later this year.

Cast and characters:

Richard Armitage … Richard
Riley Keough … Grace
Alicia Silverstone … Laura
Jaeden Lieberher … Aidan
Lia McHugh … Mia
Daniel Keough
Katelyn Wells … Wendy
Lola Reid … Young Grace

Technical details:

Running time: 100 minutes | 1.85:1 aspect ratio

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Letter from Sundance: These kids ain't all right

by PIERS MARCHANT Special to the Democrat-Gazette | Today at 1:44 a.m.


PARK CITY, Utah -- There are a great many reasons to be scared of having kids. Maybe you won't make a good parent, making the same mistakes your parents did. You'll over-indulge them, or you won't indulge them enough. They will grow up gnarled, like diseased saplings, and blame you for it for the rest of their embittered lives.

Then there is this: At the end of the day, you might have brought them in the world, but you still won't ever really know what they're capable of. You could see them every day for 14 straight years, but when the time comes, looking at them over the breakfast table, you can find yourself not having the foggiest clue who they are anymore. Right under your nose, as you've been watching them, they have suddenly become the other.
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In Uruguayan filmmaker Lucia Garibaldi's The Sharks, a 14-year-old girl named Rosina (Romina Bentancur), staying with her family in a cozy shore village, thinks she spots a shark circling in the relatively shallow waters near the beach, but it turns out, this isn't the predator you need to worry about.

Rosina, mostly bored and somnambulant, develops a crush on Joselo (Fabian Arenillas), a young man whom she works with at her father's landscaping business. After a very brief, and none-too-successful, tryst, the disaffected Rosina visits a curious series of torments upon the young man. First stealing his dog and hiding her in the woods, then calling him from an unlisted cellphone and hanging up; then, at the end, with something a bit more brazen and potentially dangerous.

Interestingly, Garibaldi never tries to explain or justify Rosina's behavior. A cipher, her expression almost never changes, even when it's clear by her actions that something matters to her a great deal. By the end, we come to realize her motivation has very little to do with emotion and even less about romantic drama: She's a Machiavelli in training, pure and simple, just testing the waters in the power of manipulation. She's not lying when she says she saw a shark, as it happens, but just about everything else she does and says features one degree of dishonesty or another. There are better ways to strike your victim beyond rows of jagged teeth.

In A Hole in the Ground, a different sort of fear strikes Sarah (Seana Kerslake), an Irish woman fleeing an abusive relationship with her 8-year-old son, Christopher (James Quinn Markey), in tow. She moves to a small, country village, and takes residence in an old brick house, which she works to restore, as young Christopher becomes acclimated to his new school. Shy and somewhat melancholy, at first Sarah doesn't know what to make of her son when shortly after their arrival, he appears to emerge from his shell, and join the popular set.

There's more: Always a reluctant eater, Christopher now wolfs down everything in sight, and the dreamy, artistic nature of her son seems to give way to a more self-consciously obedient version, whose inner life has been wiped clean. Suspicious, Sarah eventually comes to suspect that her son has been replaced by an exact physical copy, a changeling, as it were, which, in turn makes her desperately anxious about her actual son.

Lee Cronin has made a curious sort of folk tale (introducing the film to the audience, he referred to it as proper "Irish horror"). The first hour or so the narrative skates along very familiar tropes: single mother, creepy child, a remote, shadowy estate, playing each scene in a recognizable series of narrative beats. But, setting up the third act (which begins precisely when Sarah finally announces to Christopher "You're not my son!"), suddenly Cronin eschews the familiar, worn approach and turns every dial to 11, making for an impressively terrifying (and entertaining) climax.

It's the kind of question that could plague even the least paranoid sort of parent. When our kids stop acting like themselves, what has happened to them, and how are we meant to contend with this awful imposter put in their place? As good a metaphor for adolescence as any, Cronin's film picks away at a common terror for parents, young and old: What are we meant to do when the child we thought we knew suddenly morphs into someone entirely different?

More creepy kids are afoot in Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz' The Lodge, though it takes us almost the entire film to figure that out. When the mother (Alicia Silverstone) of son Aiden (Jaeden Lieberher) and daughter Mia (Lia McHugh) commits suicide after their father (Richard Armitage) leaves her for young, beautiful Grace (Riley Keough), who as a young girl, was the lone survivor of a cult who drank poison, the kids turn their full resentment on their father's new lover, and are horrified when he tells them he plans on marrying her in the spring.

His solution to their discord is to take the three of them up to the family's vacation home up in the mountains for Christmas, and ... leave them up there for a couple of days while he returns to work before the holiday. What seems like a fantastically abysmal idea gets worse, when after a day or two of the kids ignoring her, Grace begins to unravel, like a cheap sweater in the wash. They wake up one morning to find all their coats and food gone, and the house without power during a heavy snowstorm. Becoming more and more unglued, Grace, who has lost her stabilizing medication as well, can't be sure if the children are orchestrating things against her, or her own personal madness is taking over.

It could have been a solid enough premise, and atmospherically the directing duo, whose previous film Goodnight Mommy had similar spooky chops, is first-rate. But like their previous film, when it comes to actually sealing the deal narratively, things fall apart in a hurry. After a sketchy Scooby-Doo-like revelation, the film's credibility takes a large hit, none of which helps make up for the father's beyond-idiotic behavior. You can see where the filmmakers want us to go with it, but they can't get out of their own way fast enough to have it hit more than a glancing blow.

No such problem for Julius Onah's fantastic Luce, a film that delves fascinatingly into the layers of identity necessary for a black man growing up in a predominantly white, affluent neighborhood. His color is not all that sets Luce (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) apart from many of his peers. Handsome, preternaturally charming, with a tendency toward adult-pleasing obsequiousness, Luce is the star of his NoVA high school. Brought to the United States as an emotionally damaged child from his native war-torn Eritrea by a pair of doting parents, Amy and Peter (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth), he's the school valedictorian, a track athlete, and the favorite of his teachers and the school administrators, who see him as enormously important to the branding of their institution.

That is, all but one teacher, the hard-edged Ms. Wilson (Octavia Spencer), who seems to have something of a vendetta against him. After he writes a vaguely disturbing paper in her class, she takes the opportunity to rife through his locker, where she finds a bag of high-intensity fireworks. This she brings to the attention of his parents, and thus ensues a sort of rising tete-a-tete between her and the school superstar, with Luce, ever pleasant and deferential to her face, harboring his own unspoken feelings behind his implacable countenance.

Part of Onah's skill is to render each character with his or her own agenda, only some of which is ever visible on the surface. In the vein of Do the Right Thing, the movie reflects a complicated, twirling prism of point of views, in which everybody is either busy manipulating or being manipulated.

Onah also has a way of quick-jumping his characters' (and the audience's) sympathies: No one is a more staunch proponent of Luce than his mother, yet even she keeps switching her perception of him. At first, she's certain he's lying to her, then she takes enormous umbrage against Ms. Wilson, then she ends up complicit with her own falsehood. As with Spike Lee's classic, Onah is careful to not tip his hand as to whom he sees as correct or not, which leaves the narrative engagingly uncertain. At the center of this ambiguity is Luce himself, conspicuously placid up until the very last shot of the film, which, only then hints at the turmoil raging in his soul.

MovieStyle on 02/01/2019

Sundance Film Festival 2019 Review – The Lodge

February 4, 2019 by Rafael Motamayor 0 Comments

The Lodge, 2019.

Directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz.
Starring Riley Keough, Richard Armitage, Jaeden Lieberher, Alicia Silverstone, Lia McHugh, and Danny Keough.

SYNOPSIS:

The Lodge tells the psychologically chilling tale of a woman (Riley Keough) and her new stepchildren isolated in the family’s remote winter cabin, locked away to dredge up the mysteries of her dark past and the losses that seem to haunt them all.

You know you’re in for a wild ride when a film opens with a literal gunshot to the head. If you thought directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz are not messing around with their follow up to Goodnight Mommy. 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.

After their mom (Alicia Silverstone) kills herself, Aidan (Jaeden Lieberher) and Mia (Lia McHugh) are sent to live with their father (Richard Armitage). To make matters worse, father wants them all to spend Christmas together with his new, younger girlfriend Grace (Riley Keough), whom he plans to marry.

Of course, there is great animosity between the children and Grace, and the fact that they get trapped in a lodge because of a snowstorm while father is away certainly doesn’t help. There is something wrong about Grace, who is the sole survivor of a religious death cult ran by her father (Keough’s actual father, Danny Keough). She seems perfectly normal and kind on the outside, but small things set her off, adding to a sense of dread that surrounds the entire film. Then things start happening in the lodge, and the camera lingers on Mia’s creepy-looking doll who she talks to. It doesn’t help that there are pictures of Mia and Aiden’s mom all over the place, as well as lots of Catholic iconography decorating the cabin, which unnerves Grace.

Lieberher and McHugh are outstanding as the kids, and Lieberher specially takes what he learned in It and uses it to great effect in The Lodge. The kids go from adorable to Damien from The Omen every 5 seconds. Indeed, about half of the notes I took during my screening where “Is X person evil?” and “Wait, is Y person really evil?” Fiala and Franz keep you guessing who is really at fault, or if it’s all just in Grace’s imagination.

Riley Keough does a career-best performance as Grace, who is disturbingly impressive as the focus of the film. We see her starting to get unhinged by the weird things happening in her house, and the confusion and fear in her face as she keeps having vivid dreams that may be more than that. But underneath the dread, there’s a sweet and kind woman who is trying to get over her demons, bond with her future step-children, and who loves her dog. This is a nightmarish and unforgettable performance.

Fiala and Franz excel at creating a tense and chilly atmosphere and fill it with dread. As the snow closes in on the titular lodge and the paranoia settles in, memories of The Thing will come to mind. There are some incredible shots that may warrant comparisons to last year’s Hereditary, as there are plenty of creepy miniature houses, low angles and shots of room corners. You will feel claustrophobic, then sad for this make-shift family, then terrified by the creepy imagery on screen.

It may be too early to declare The Lodge as the next great horror movie, but it isn’t too early to call this one hell of a sophomore feature. The Lodge will keep you on your toes with its constant sense of dread and claustrophobia, even if it draws you in with likeable and relatable characters.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Rafael Motamayor

These Are the Sci-Fi and Horror Films Likely to Break Out of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival
Germain Lussier
Yesterday 12:15pmFiled to: Sci-fi


Besides being great genre films, what do The Blair Witch Project, Saw, Get Out, Memento, Donnie Darko, Hereditary, and 28 Days Later have in common? They all premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

Each year Sundance gives the world its first glimpse at some of the best films the rest of the year will offer in all genres. And quite often, that includes a few all-time classics. Movies like the ones above. The 2019 festival wrapped up this past weekend and based on buzz and reviews, a few stand out as genre movies we’re probably gonna be talking a lot about later this year.

Little Monsters

Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o stars as a kindergarten teacher who has to protect her class from zombies. Bloody Disgusting called it “the perfect crowd-pleaser of a zombie film” and “a horror comedy that’s part Zombieland, part School of Rock.” Neon picked up the distribution rights, in partnership with Hulu. It currently has a 100 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes with 16 reviews.

Sweetheart

Kiersey Clemons (the recent Rent: Live) starts in this film about a woman stranded on an island who eventually realizes she’s sharing the island with a monster. It was directed by J.D. Dillard, who did the great movie Sleight, and Vulture called it “an ingenious affair, a no-nonsense monster movie that uses its limitations effectively and tells its story cinematically.” It currently has a 100 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes with eight reviews.

The Lodge

Riley Keough, Alicia Silverstone, and Richard Armitage star in this tale of a family going to a remote cabin, only to be snowed in—and then shit really starts going down. The team behind Goodnight Mommy, Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, are responsible for the thrills, and Neon picked up the distribution rights. Collider called it “a relentless, mind-bending psychological nightmare in which the threat of demons from one’s past are always lurking.” It currently has an 85 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 13 reviews.

The Hole in the Ground

We’ve seen a trailer for this one, which is a plus. It’s about a young boy who disappears in a sinkhole, only to come back and as not quite himself. Variety says “the trim, jumpy debut feature [of Lee Cronin] rewrites no genre rules, but abounds in bristly calling-card atmospherics.” It boasts an 85 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 13 reviews.

I Am Mother

This is one that stood out for us going into the festival and, it turns out, mostly lived up to those expectations. It’s about a young girl who is raised by a robot after humanity ends. The Hollywood Reporter called it “an uncommonly ambitious feature debut with impressive design work, sharp visual effects, a fabulous A.I. creation and a compelling lead performance.” The film sits with 94 percent from 16 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

Wounds

Apparently, Armie Hammer was spreading fake cockroaches around Park City to promote his new movie, Wounds, which co-stars Dakota Johnson and is about a couple who try to figure out what the fuck is going on with a cursed cell phone they find. Mashable said “What this movie is about, what it’s trying to do, I couldn’t really tell you. But it is never boring.” And that seems to show in its Rotten Tomatoes score, which is 67 percent out of 12 reviews.

Paradise Hills

Emma Roberts and Milla Jovovich lead a stacked cast in a movie about an island where rich families send their daughters in order to become the best versions of themselves. Obviously, something else is going on there. /Film called it “A stunning, vibrant fairy tale tinged with suspense and packed with riveting ideas” and with just eight reviews, it’s got 63 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Lodge Review: The Next Elevated Horror Gem
The Lodge is the best horror movie out of Sundance and a slow boil chiller where you won't know who is haunting who.
Review David Crow
Feb 5, 2019

For years now, the Sundance Film Festival has been a staging ground to announce exciting new voices in horror cinema. The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, and Hereditary all either got their start or built hellish momentum among the snowy slopes of Park City in recent fests past. So perhaps it’s fitting then that the clear heir apparent in 2019 is a film all about what old terrors can thaw in one’s mind when the ground outside freezes over.

As directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s follow-up to Goodnight Mommy, The Lodge is another unsettling sleight of hand about the constricting nature of familial bonds, especially when there is no actual familiarity between you and the person at the other end of a rope. A tense exercise of claustrophobia in a snowy outpost, the film stands on the shoulders of horror royalty while plowing its own path to memorable disturbance, in no small part thanks to a tour de force performance by Riley Keough.

As the interloper in a collapsing family, Keough’s Grace is no stranger to tragedy in The Lodge. Many years ago, she was the lone child survivor of a suicide cult that was shepherded to the great hereafter by her dogmatic father. It is that very extreme ordeal that brought her to the attention of Richard (Richard Armitage), an author who told her story—and then left his wife for the younger Grace. Granted we don’t see any of this; it is merely inferred when Richard’s estranged wife Laura (Alicia Silverstone) suddenly kills herself in a moment of jealous despair in the film’s opening—leaving behind grief, anger, and fear for her and Richard’s children Aidan (Jaeden Lieberher) and Mia (Lia McHugh).

Thus things are already icy before Richard suggests that Aidan and Mia get to know Grace better by spending Christmas with her in the family’s remote cabin in the mountains. Alone. And without a car. (Dad will come up on the 25th). Yet as earnestly as Grace tries to connect with these kids, there is a gnawing anxiety well before the snow storm rages outside, and Grace and the children hear what sounds like footsteps walking around the house. Are they really alone? Is Grace fully able to be trusted considering she’s on medication for lingering mental trauma? Can the wrathful kids? It’s all an open question before the power goes out and the food, cellphones, and Grace's beloved dog go missing. Those things, plus Grace's medication.

It is easy to draw a parallel between The Lodge and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, in no small part because both films rely on an enormous performance to ensnare its audience in a feeling of snowbound confusion. It is an open question throughout the film’s running time just exactly what is real and what might Grace be imagining, as well as if her hallucinations are actually supernatural—an engagement gift from a mother who still wants to spend Christmas with the family. However, the true ingenuity of the film is not its anecdotal similarities to Kubrick’s maddening chiller; it is how sleekly it reinvents the tropes of Gothic horror for modern indie sensibilities.

With a slow boil from ice to fire that is increasingly familiar for fans of recent elevated horror, Fiala and Franz have found a covert way to rework the queasy disorientation of Gaslight for a new generation. It’s obvious someone is tormenting the characters in the film and making one or more parties think they’re mad, but just who is gaslighting whom? Perhaps Silverstone’s ghost really is walking these halls and forcing Grace to think on her sins of coveting another woman’s husband; mayhaps it’s the children enraged by this other woman who, for all her kindness, is arguably responsible for their mother’s death; or just maybe Grace really is simply losing her mind after a lifetime of latent guilt? She doesn’t need ghosts to hear the echo of her father’s commanding threat: repent.

The emotional confusion of not being able to trust any of the characters while nevertheless watching them all suffer creates a psychological torment that is a bit like three-card monte. You are no longer fully aware of where you are, but you have a sinking feeling that all will be lost when the game’s over, and that bucket of dread the movie is built around boils over.

And it surely does thanks in a major way to Keough. No stranger to indie thrillers (she previously appeared in It Comes at Night and Hold the Dark), Keough finally has one she can dominate all on her own. When at last introduced as a sincerely warm and kindhearted woman who loves her dog and wants to connect with these children, Fiala and Franz have nevertheless given viewers reasons to be wary. Always kept off-screen or behind a frosted glass until the moment she’s in the car headed to the lodge with the kids, Grace is provided with what Orson Welles dubbed the “star entrance” 15 minutes into the film, at which point it becomes hers. Hence her downward fall from well-meaning protagonist to possible antagonist will likely be horror’s greatest special effect this year.

In Film/TV
Sundance Review: Horror flick ‘The Lodge’ is ‘Hereditary’ Lite

The new film from the ‘Goodnight Mommy’ directors frustrates more than it unnerves
By Nick Johnstonon February 5, 2019


Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s wintery horror The Lodge practically invites overt comparisons to Ari Astor’s Hereditary from its dollhouse-centered imagery all the way through its twisty plot, and it’s almost impossible to talk about this new film without thinking just how outmatched and outclassed the latest film from the Goodnight Mommy directors feels when held next to that 2018 Sundance hit. It’s a movie about Grace (Riley Keough), the daughter of a cult leader whose suicide, (think Heaven’s Gate if they were a bit more like the redneck cult in Far Cry 5) alongside the rest of his church, she was left alone to videotape as a child. She’s recovered somewhat in the intervening decades, and has even struck up a romance with Richard (Richard Armitage), a crime writer whose two children (Lia McHugh and The Book of Henry’s Jaeden Lieberher) are suspicious of her intentions. Grace and the children eventually stay alone together at a lodge that Richard owned once-upon-a-time with his now-dead ex-wife (Alicia Silverstone) over Christmas break as a bonding exercise, and creepy shit begins to happen to them.

You know how it goes: It’s cold and sparse and doubly so emotionally, much like every one of these elevated horror puzzle boxes go, and it’s as dramatically inert and miserable as the dumb dollhouse that Franz and Fiala try to pull so much imagery out of. Whereas Astor, at least, could hold his compositions for long enough that their details burned in to one’s rods and cones, the duo’s camera is always moving, slowly zooming in on any and all action within their frame, which makes a lot of The Lodge feel impatient rather than creepy and, occasionally, it becomes deliriously unpleasant to watch. Again, similarly to Hereditary, the pair confuse LOUD NOISES for pathos in their actors’ direction, but Keough isn’t as strong as as a performer as Collette, which means her character oscillates between numbness and shouting and crying throughout most of the runtime. If you follow the old adage that “best” acting means “most” acting, that Keough will receive plenty of undeserved accolades for her work here (there’s no scene as strong as the seance sequence in Astor’s film, which added an extra layer of fascination to Collette’s performance that would have never made the highlight reels).

Finally, and perhaps the most damning thing about The Lodge, Hereditary and every other “A24or” fright flicks of this vintage, is that their conclusions are never as interesting as the endings that they spend the entire runtime teasing. They always feel like failures of ambition, where these initially perfectly-pitched dream-logic nightmares settle for the broadest and most boring possible explanation for their happenings instead of embracing the chaos of a potentially risky decision, lest they be cited for a “lack of authorial control” by film critics.

As such, The Lodge bored the hell out of me, having neither the bonafides of a controversial horror classic or the fun of a freewheeling genre exercise, though I’m willing to be that those enchanted with the style of this particular subgenre will find plenty to chew on here. I guess I’m just growing sicker and sicker of these “elevated” horror films, which have begun to feel more and more like when Brooklyn chefs attempt to put a “new twist on a southern classic” and then the Internet dunks on Vice for covering the tapas-like results. Sometimes you just want the full plate instead of the aromatics-laden sampler, and The Lodge is the kind of movie that’s fine with you going to bed hungry.

Follow Nick Johnston on Twitter @onlysaysficus. Featured image courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Posted by Jason Gorber - February 12, 2019
Sundance Journal: The Lodge

Movie Rating:
4.5

Sundance often has sleeper hits come out of the Midnight Section. (2018 saw both Mandy and Hereditary.) This year’s boldest film seems to be The Lodge, the English-language debut by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, the Austrian team behind 2014’s celebrated Goodnight Mommy.

Ostensibly a family drama where people outdo each other in behaving badly, the most remarkable element of The Lodge is how it’s able to sustain a chilling mood throughout without ever going off the rails. It’s a testament to the precision of performance and direction, which make for a truly haunting work that avoids histrionics while still crawling under your skin.

With a beautiful and icy look thanks to Kubrickian photography by Thimios Bakatakis (The Lobster), Fanz and Fiala’s vision is one of stark contrast between the hominess of the cabin and the stark, blank whiteness outside. Shot in a snowy Quebec standing in for California, the location provides the perfect contrast between comfort and danger.

With fine performances by Riley Keough, Richard Armitage, and Alicia Silverstone, it’s the kids Jaeden Leiberher and Lia McHugh who really up the ante. These directors are experts at coaxing phenomenal performances out of their child collaborators.

This dark and twisted tale evokes films like The Shining but defies any expectations while doing so. The movie brilliantly employs traditional spooky scare tactics and twists them on their head, finding that the most effecting and scary things need not be from supernatural feats but from the bare cruelty of humanity.

The Lodge is a frosty bit of fabulousness, unafraid to enter to some supremely dark places without ever devolving into easy resolution. It’s a testament to how evil can just as easily emerge from human beings rather than supernatural sources, and how self-serving actions can trigger deadly consequences. A tremendous English debut from these fine filmmakers, this is a far grander movie than its genre categorization may pigeonhole it, and an exceptional drama for horror fans or the squeamish alike.

Overlook Film Festival Review: THE LODGE

Home2019June5Overlook Film Festival Review: THE LODGE

June 5, 2019 Julieann Stipidis 1

I’ve never been too keen on having children, quite frankly, and thanks to Veronika Franz’s and Severin Fiala’s 2014 feature Goodnight Mommy and now their much-anticipated English-language follow up, THE LODGE, not only do I not want to have children of my own, but I sure as hell do not want to be a stepmom anytime soon either…

THE LODGE follows Grace, (a perfectly casted Riley Keough) a traumatized, former extreme Evangelist cult victim who is engaged to Richard, (Richard Armitage) the researcher of a book about said cult. Richard’s children Aiden (It’s Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh) blame Grace for ending the marriage between Richard and their heartbroken mother Laura, (Alicia Silverstone) and when it’s time for a blizzard-y Christmas vacation in the family’s deserted log cabin, Grace is forced to face the traumas of her past in an “Are we already dead and in purgatory?” type of hellish nightmare. (Yes, that question is actually asked.)

THE LODGE starts out promising. Within the first 15 minutes, the film jolts your attention with a loud bang and a whole lot of blood splattered on the walls. I’ll leave it at that (because I’m frankly disappointed in the amount of other reviews I read from its Sundance premiere that spoiled what exactly happens in this shocking moment.) The Overlook audience at my screening made all kinds of audible reactions. In addition to the well-crafted sound design throughout, Franz, Fiala, and cinematographer Thimios Bakatas waste no time establishing the film’s bleak tone through somber gray lighting, restraining shots of quiet, empty hallways and mysteriously closing doors, and even a macabre dollhouse that mirrors the characters’ “real” lives…which would have been wholly more effective if Hereditary and HBO thriller-drama Sharp Objects hadn’t already done it so well just one year ago. Whereas the dollhouses in those other two served as a thematic purpose to their respective narratives, the dolls and dollhouse in THE LODGE only exist to drum up the atmosphere and for little Mia to drag around when she’s missing certain family members.

The film feels as cold as its backdrop’s below-freezing temperatures, which I mean as a compliment in some ways, but in other ways— not as much. My biggest praise lies in its effectiveness: the filmmakers choose chilling subtlety over cheap jump scares. Several moments had me questioning whether or not I actually witnessed what I thought I witnessed in the dark corner. The visuals are often nightmare fuel, especially in what they choose not to show to you, because they understand that what you will envision in your head is much scarier than what they could create. They know how to craft horror that sinks under your skin and lingers long after viewing, which we already knew. I mean, who could forget that final shot of Goodnight Mommy? And the final moments of THE LODGE are just as unsettling, even if you see it coming from a mile away. However, the issues that are caused by the film’s coldness come from its script. Primarily empty dialogue, shallow characters (except for Keough’s Grace) and even stranger character decisions left me craving more. With the exception of Grace, detached, unlikeable characters make it difficult to get behind anyone except for her and the madness of what she is going through. Her fiancé Richard is thinly written, and the children garnered zero sympathy from me, even though they are kids— and maybe I should have felt something for them other than pure disdain? (Seriously, they were insufferable little jerks, in my opinion.)

Unfortunately, THE LODGE is often too logically inconsistent to be placed on the same tier as other slow-burn, contemporary favorites like Hereditary and The Witch. It seems to be suffering from an identity crisis: it wants to be Catholic guilt/religious horror, cult horror, supernatural horror, and haunted house horror, with knowing nods to The Shining, and while there is absolutely nothing wrong with mixing different subgenres and tropes into one film (hell, look how well it worked for Hereditary) the film sometimes feels too repetitive and unfocused, especially within the occurrences it expects you to buy into. A few moments during my screening I cringed in disbelief because I just wasn’t buying a few of the absurd logical issues that the film was trying to sell to me.

Even though I felt that this sophomore effort was not as strong and cohesive as the filmmakers’ debut, is THE LODGE still worth your time? Most definitely. It has its issues, but I guarantee it’ll make you feel icky afterwards with what it implies, and as horror fans, that’s all we need to get our butts in the seats.

THE LODGE will be distributed by NEON and is slated for a Fall 2019 release.

Mike’s Review: The Lodge (2019)
By msoup6 days ago ( 1 )


Directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala

2017 gave us Get Out. 2018 gave us Heriditary. 2019’s dive in to intellectual terror is the Lodge. Just as its forefathers were dark, brooding, thought-provoking, and terrifying, so is this year’s entry in to the new age of thinky-horror. Note: thinky-horror is not yet an industry-accepted term, but you heard it hear first.

The Lodge, a Hammer (yes, that Hammer) produced film, stars none-other-than Alicia Silverstone and the daughter of Lisa Marie Presley (yes, that Lisa Marie Presley), Riley Keough. Pulling no punches and have no concern for the audience’s emotional well-being, The Lodge starts off with a bang and never looks back. The film throws you smack-dab in to the middle of a family in crisis, faced with looming divorce, a new step mom, and deep-seated animosities. The animosities, mind you, aren’t held by a single family member, oh no, they’re held by Mom, Dad, Brother, Sister, and Step Mom. No one’s pleased with each other and The Lodge lets you know it.
Step mom Grace checking in on the kids.

The other slice of brilliance that The Lodge serves up is the premise and the setting of said premise. Trying desperately to keep some semblance of normality, the father Richard (Richard Armitage) decides to manufacture a faux bonding session with his kids Aiden (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh) and their soon-to-be step mom Grace (Riley Presley). Before the family sets out for the family lodge, the filmmakers very deftly and subtly let the audience in on a dark secret — along with being Grace’s lover, Richard might just also be treating her for some psychological damage…and, and, and, that damage may be the result of the fact that Grace is the sole survivor of a whacked-out Christian suicide cult.

The group sets out in the dead of winter for the bucolic family cabin (AKA lodge) in the woods. However, almost immediately upon their arrival the father, Richard, announces that he’s got work to tend to back in the city and the kids and their new step get to hang and bond — one on one. The kids are having none of their father’s kind, but wrong-headed, offer. Grace is not a particularly strong motherly presence and kids are ultimately unreceptive to her kindness. Almost as soon as Richard is out the door, the flood of Christian suicide cult memories and visions begin to cloud Grace’s already fragile constitution. The kids not only choose not to help Grace through her ever-evolving crisis, they actually choose to be petty and particularly unwelcoming to their step mother to be.

As The Lodge slowly burns its way in to the third act, Grace’s psychosis becomes frighteningly heightened. Her visions become sharper and the memories of the Christian suicide cult begin to manifest themselves all over the family lodge. As a nasty storm sets in, the anxiety and tensions between Grace and the kids continue to mount and Richard is no where to be found. The clock continually resets itself to January 9. Newspaper obituaries about the kids and Grace begin to appear. Grace’s sleep becomes prolonged and coma-like. And then…the power and water goes out. Stuck waist-deep in snow with no water, no food, and a delicate set of relationships, Grace and the kids are now forced to come to terms with each other’s motives.

Eventually, directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala ethereally unpack Grace’s psychosis in possibly the darkest and most vile ways possible. Far more dark than Hereditary and far more disturbing than Get Out, the Lodge ends in an awful and detestable way. While terrifying and dark, the ending of The Lodge is a smart slice of filmmaking that was clearly not focus-grouped, that had singular purpose, and is a film that is ultimately powerful and glum. Make no mistake, the Lodge is a horror film that will stick with you for years to come. The imagery, the darkness, and the family decay might just have you second-guessing this year’s 4th of July picnic invite from Uncle Richard and Aunt Grace.

The Lodge isn’t rated, but we’re going with a hard R. The Lodge will be released in the U.S. on June 15.

By Matt Donato
Jun 3, 2019

Overlook Film Festival: ‘The Lodge’ Review – Three Reasons To See It

The Lodge is a methodically insidious and outstandingly tense entry into the “Christmas Horror” canon. Trust me. I’ve watched almost 120 Xmas slashers, spectral haunts, and holiday nightmares. Directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz follow their suffocatingly dreadful Goodnight Mommy with a tragic story of separation, loss, and vulnerable kids forced to cope with the unthinkable. Sadistic psychological horror accented by gunshot blasts and dollhouse crime scenes, increasing tension in prolonged still moments radiate nothing but ill-intent. Oh holy fright, these scares are brutally sinful…

Richard (Richard Armitage) is a father tasked with restoring his family’s stability after leaving ex-wife Laura (Alicia Silverstone). With Christmas Eve approaching, he suggests to son Aidan (Jaeden Lieberher) and daughter Mia (Lia McHugh) another celebratory stay in their secluded vacation lodge – with an added guest. To strengthen the relationship between kin and future second wife, Grace (Riley Keough) tags along. Richard’s work requires him to stay back until Christmas, leaving Aidan, Mia, and Grace to bond uninhibited despite Aidan’s vehement protest and Grace’s unsettling history of being the lone survivor of a satanic cult.

Neon snagged distribution rights for The Lodge out of Sundance and set release for this fall (no date yet). As we do around these parts, here are three frost-covered reasons to weather this relentless trauma-heavy blizzard.

1. Dread And Instability Of The Highest Order

Hell comes to Richard’s cozy wooden abode and kicks the door down while he’s blissfully unaware. Fiala and Franz’s approach to horror requires nothing more than human characters acting on their nastiest urges. Aidan and Mia blame Grace for their mother’s removal from parental pictures, making it clear they hold no compassion for their father’s new flame. From frame one, there’s zero mincing words. Aidan and Grace are not destined for friendship. Motivated by bottomless levels of grief, the kids are at their best as Grace slowly devolves into her worst.

As nights pass, mysteries pile higher than fresh roadside snowplow banks. Grace awakens in random locations (standing bedside Paranormal Activity style or laying down), memories of her father’s repetition of “Repent!” ringing in her ears; a regression to the child discovered at the scene of a mass cult suicide. Aidan and Mia hear their increasingly disturbed future stepmother stirring about during midnight hours, pointing blame when personal objects go missing with no signs of a break-in. In this vein, The Lodge continuously pushes characters to dangerous brinks with rabid intensity. A hangman’s noose, a loaded revolver, a saint’s painting – weapons of the unhinged that assure only the highest order of teeth-clenched dread as you realize just how sinister a film you’re watching.

2. Riley Keough’s Climb Inside The Mouth Of Madness

As fans voice their desires for horror to be more widely recognized by awards ceremonies, Riley Keough’s performance in The Lodge is another “Give Toni Collette an Oscar for Hereditary, you cowards” situation. Undoubtedly one of the year’s best horror performances. Grace’s childhood marred by death, emotional abuse and father’s Bible-fanatic preaching creates constant character mistrust, just as Richard’s children reflect upon researching Grace’s family history online. Keough plays a woman attempting to move forward years later, still haunted by corpses with “Sin” scribbled on duct tape placed across closed mouths. Her genuine desire to rebuild is lit ablaze by Fiala and Franz’s proclivity to torment their already traumatized character, even as you see the cracks were only just papered over, never gone. That’s when the fun begins.

Keough’s transformation from attempted niceties with the kids to unpredictable sleepwalker to a victim of powers outside her control punishes hopefulness. Her forehead scrunched and frustrations visible when staring at decorative religious effects that trigger internal playbacks of her father’s hellfire and damnation give way to dead, blank eyes gazing outward into nothingness as less and less about her world makes sense. Frayed ends of sanity cannot be gripped, as Keough jettisons herself from reality into a broken land where despair leaves only one foreseeable option of escape. Understated, subtle, searing instability that’s played red-hot enough by Keough to melt Antarctica dry. Excuse my vagueness, but to reveal any more would spoil the how and why of Grace’s rapid descent into gaslit madness.

3. What’s A Sophomore Slump?

Fiala and Franz prove themselves to be anything but one-trick ponies after creeping under our skin with Goodnight Mommy. Once again the filmmakers utilize maternal relationships with adversarial children, pitting adults versus pipsqueaks in a battle of unwavering wits – or in this case, unwavering trauma. The weight of the thematic emotional core is densely complex, clarified and framed by the frozen simplicity and minimalist isolation of the setting. Richard’s cabin sits entirely removed from civilization, a purgatory where sins are relived, committed and exposed all at once. Like the water itself, audiences are trapped under the thick ice for an inevitable plunge into icy dread.

The Lodge is confident, take-no-prisoners horror that aims for the gut and watches you writhe and squirm in agony. So stylistic when panning through foreshadowing dollhouse rooms, or how Keough’s Grace loses human touches over time (the jerky movements of a marionette, for example). It’s Christmas horror that doesn’t need monsters or slashers given how man’s basest instincts are horrifying enough. Fiala and Franz heartlessly abuse their characters, gleefully punish their audiences, and treat horror cinema as the unforgivably mortifying genre it’s meant to be. Can masochism be an art form? It’s the only reality given how impressed I was by a film intent on making me feel as destroyed as possible.

[Overlook 2019 Review] THE LODGE is a Deeply Effective Film that Explores the Terrifying Consequences of Trauma

Posted by Kimberley Elizabeth | Jun 4, 2019 | Reviews |

[Overlook 2019 Review] THE LODGE is a Deeply Effective Film that Explores the Terrifying Consequences of TraumaScore 82%Score 82%

Anyone who has seen Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (read: everyone) knows there is nothing more terrifying than snow when combined with isolation. The pair make for a foreboding cocktail, one that will ultimately weigh on the sanity and decision-making of anyone caught in its path. 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. Audiences can only grip tightly to their seats and brace for the inevitable. We are stuck aboard with trauma, sorrow, guilt – and pure, raw terror.

“[T]rauma, sorrow, guilt – and pure, raw terror.”

The Lodge opens on mother Laura (Alicia Silverstone) and her two children Mia (Lia McHugh, Along Came the Devil) and Aiden (Jaeden Lieberher, It and It: Chapter Two), Laura rushedly rounding up her children to be dropped off at their father Richard’s (Richard Armitage) house. The pair go reluctantly, bemoaning “is she going to be there?” when they pull up to the front drive. She is dad’s new girlfriend – Grace (Riley Keough, Hold the Dark, Under the Silver Lake), who we initially don’t meet. She instead haunts the outskirts of the early scenes like a ghost, her shadow appearing in the front window like an eclipse over this broken family. When Richard asks Laura to finalize their divorce so that he can marry Grace in the Spring, we get our first glimpse just how deep The Lodge’s basement. While her children are still spending time with their father, calm and quiet as a dentist’s office, Laura slides the barrel of a revolver into her mouth, pulls the trigger, and lets her pain splatter all over the dining room wall.

Aiden and Mia tearfully grieve their mother’s loss, and it’s heartbreaking and nearly unbearable to watch. Now in the primary care of their father, Richard is at first respectful not to bring Grace around while the pain of their mother’s death is still raw. But by the time Thanksgiving arrives, Richard is ready to begin repairing and re-building his family, ignoring Aiden and Mia’s protests. They plan a Christmas holiday at the family lodge, and it seems like a great idea for the family to spend some time away. Until it isn’t.

Riley Keough has exploded onto the genre scene over the past two years, first landing on my radar after appearing as Kim in It Comes At Night. She possesses a natural talent of playing guarded, alluring, and mysterious characters; ones that emote with dry eyes and pursed lips. These characters tango through nearly every mumblegore film of the creeping A24 indie takeover, so it’s no surprise Keough’s star has been rising along with them. Grace is another perfect specimen to add to her glass jars shelved on IMDB. The lone survivor of a religious cult, Grace was found among the bodies of her family and religious community as a child. A traumatized sheep in a flock of suicides.

As the audience, we are guarded around Grace, unsure how deeply her trauma bubbles. She hugs an adorable dog Grady tightly wherever she goes, drapes herself in cozy blankets and shawls, and secretly hides prescription medication in her bedroom end table – so we hope she’s gotten the help and has the appropriate self-care/support to be a mother figure, or even to just simply befriend Richard’s children.

But Aiden and Mia aren’t about to let Mom #2 into their lives so easy. After Richard heads back into the city for work, the reluctant trio are left alone in the isolated lodge. Winter rages on, and the kiddos ignore supper calls, knocks on doors, and tv time. Grace is running out of ideas to warm them over.

“We have no idea just what we’re so utterly afraid of, but The Lodge will stew us in dread anyway with its intentionally vague plotting and a screenplay paced to withhold.”

The Lodge is a tense story steeped in dread. We have no idea just what we’re so utterly afraid of, but The Lodge will stew us in dread anyway with its intentionally vague plotting and a screenplay paced to withhold. The eerieness is very much akin to Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001). Terrible things have already happened. We’re sure terrible things are to come. We can’t do anything about it. We can’t see a way out of The Lodge.

I’m remaining vague, as The Lodge is best served in a dark theater with few expectations or clues on what to anticipate. The film does lull a bit in the middle after audiences tie knots and connect events, but the final act will take you on a harrowing journey whether or not you know the direction the film is headed. And don’t be surprised if the knots you tie unravel at your feet.

Hammer Films’ The Lodge screened at the 2019 Overlook Film Festival. Stay tuned to Nightmare on Film Street for more coverage and highlights from the festival, and let us know which films you’re excited to check out over on Twitter, Reddit, and the Horror Movie Fiend Club on Facebook!

Overlook Film Festival ’19 Recap: Ghosts, Movies, and “Paperbacks from Hell”
Published 1 week ago

on June 3, 2019

By Meagan Navarro


[...]

The Lodge

The closing night film of the fest, Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s second feature packed the theater to capacity in short order thanks to the buzz from Sundance. Our own Meredith said the film “is crafted for utmost discomfort, making for a relentless onslaught of unease,” in her review. It’s true. Fiala and Franz present an oppressive, bleak story from the outset and only coils the dread tighter as it continues. There are no twists here; the directors lay out exactly what’s going to happen ahead of time, making the journey that much more uncomfortable and haunting. The Lodge is a vicious, mean spirited film that’s sure to leave a mark. It’s hardly the scariest film ever made, but it is one that’s so heavy and bleak that it’ll linger in your mind long after. And Riley Keough is a revelation. Luckily NEON will be releasing this one in the fall.

The Lodge (2019)
Drama, Horror, ThrillerGrossbritannien, USA100 Minuten
Filmkritik: Sekte oder Shelter?
19. Neuchatel International Fantastic Film Festival 2019
Ich seh ich seh 2

Zwei Halbweisen ziehen mit ihrem Papa Richard (Richard Armitage) und seiner neuen Partnerin Grace (Riley Keough) über Thanksgiving in ein Chalet in den Bergen. Die Kids vermissen die Mutter immer noch. Richard lässt den Nachwuchs aber ein paar Tage mit der neuen Frau allein, damit man sich finden kann. Die Kinder finden stattdessen seltsame Videos aus der Zeit, als Grace noch Teil einer Sekte war. Geheuer ist Ihnen das nicht. Ungeheuerlich wird in der Folge auch das Verhalten der Stiefmutter.

Die österreichischen Macher von Ich seh, ich seh scheitern mit ihrem ersten US-Film. Alicia Silverstone in Ehren: Der Kurzauftritt der Nineties-Ikone ist zwar ein kleiner Schock, aber eben auch nur "kurz". In Einzelszenen ist der Thriller mit Anleihen an Schnee-Grusler wie The Thing oder The Shining durchaus ansprechend. Die Handschrift des Autorenteams ist erkennbar. Insgesamt hat der Film aber zu viele falsch gelegte Fährten und Unplausibilitäten und langweilt als Ganzes - trotz einiger Nervenkleid zerschlitzenden Ideen-Blitzern.

16.07.2019 / rm