MIFF Session 11: THE LODGE

  Richard is divorcing Laura who is still in such denial about it that when he insists they move forward with it kills herself. At an unspecified time later, Richard takes his two kids and stepmother to be, Grace, out to the winter wonderland of the family lodge. The kids Google the usurping Grace and find that she was the only survivor of a suicide cult. Grace seems ok now and pops masses of pills to keep herself in okville. So the happy new family settles in for homely white Christmas. But wait, Richard is such a high flyer that he has to go back to the city for a couple of days while his edgy bride to be gets cosy with the two kids who feel a righteous vengeance a-brewin' in a house that is going to be completely snowed in. You have a gun.

This tale of horror by manipulation progresses from its creative team of Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz who brought us the finely crafted and powerful Ich Sehe Ich Sehe (Goodnight Mommie). Now they've gone America and the dialogue is in English. And they have a good idea: what can be done with co-dependent credulity that is usually given the label of virtue (religion, in this case)? The answer is plenty and the answer is obvious so there must be something else to justify this story being told at all, mustn't there? I mean, most horror is a means to smuggle depth of thinking into a universal dread. So why does that not work here when the earlier outing worked a treat? It can't just be the language change.

It isn't. What has happened along the way between a good premise for a horror tale and what appears on the screen is that empathy loses. In Ich Sehe we were easily drawn into the opposing viewpoints of the boys and their mother as the stakes rose ever higher and the dread swelled up and got to a heart-sinking conclusion. The Lodge, despite an evocative setting and decent performances keeps its cards so tightly to its chest that all we see is the ploy at work, rolling on without jeopardy until it ends. If you've felt for any character you see on screen I'd love to sit down and talk over a coffee or a cognac as to what I was missing.

The screening began with the customary dimming of the lights and the MIFF logo slide appearing on the screen as the hubbub lowered to silence. Then the stage lights went up and someone announced that there would be security staff with nightvision goggles would be roaming the auditorium ready to sever the hands of anyone pirating the movie with a mobile phone (ok, the bit about the severing of hands is my contribution). I have never witnessed such bullshit at a MIFF screening. Two things about that: it made the entire audience restless enough that they had to settle down all over again which cut into the screening time and everyone babbled about it and anyone who wanted a crappy phone copy of a piece of cinematic rubbish like this should be welcome to it or at least explain why by way of payment.

At one point the stepmother and the kids watch John Carpenter's The Thing because, you know, it's just as icy and tight with suspicion and othering in a familiar setting. If only. The iciness of the approach cost this film its raison d'etre. Same thing when the contemporary Japanese master Kyoshi Kurosawa made a self-avowed non-scary ghost story in Retribution (of course it was scary, he was just saying that). This film comes to us with the label of the great Hammer studio name. But as low on scares as the classic Hammer horrors were they never neglected empathy. This is just mishandled and it worries me as to why as it seems so deliberate. Here we have a situation where a few moments of severe violence (and the pitifully telescoped fate of a cute animal) fail to brace us for suspense to come. We see the final scene which is more of the same of what we've already witnessed, the credits roll and we shrug. Right, now we can go. It worries me because this is what it looks like when filmmakers who disdain horror make horror movies; they want to rise above the genre vulgarity and show how clever they are. Well, they've already made a clever horror movie. Was it just time to do a stupid one?

Oh, there are no real spoilers in the above. Most of those plot points are made in the first fifteen minutes of the film and you'll get the point about the animal as soon as you see it.