{"id":8054,"date":"2019-06-03T17:17:16","date_gmt":"2019-06-04T00:17:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog-proxy.atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/?p=8054"},"modified":"2019-06-04T18:40:32","modified_gmt":"2019-06-05T01:40:32","slug":"overlook-film-festival-the-lodge-review-three-reasons-to-see-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/the-lodge-review-overlook-film-festival\/","title":{"rendered":"Overlook Film Festival: &#8216;The Lodge&#8217; Review \u2013 Three Reasons To See It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>The Lodge<\/em> is a methodically insidious and outstandingly tense entry into the \u201cChristmas Horror\u201d canon. Trust me. I\u2019ve watched almost 120 Xmas slashers, spectral haunts, and holiday nightmares. Directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz follow their suffocatingly dreadful <em>Goodnight Mommy<\/em> 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\u2026<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1e9vhZ7UJqA?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Richard (Richard Armitage) is a father tasked with restoring his family\u2019s 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 &#8211; with an added guest. To strengthen the relationship between kin and future second wife, Grace (Riley Keough) tags along. Richard\u2019s work requires him to stay back until Christmas, leaving Aidan, Mia, and Grace to bond uninhibited despite Aidan\u2019s vehement protest and Grace\u2019s unsettling history of being the lone survivor of a satanic cult.<\/p>\n<p>Neon snagged distribution rights for\u00a0<em>The Lodge<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<h2>1. Dread And Instability Of The Highest Order<\/h2>\n<p>Hell comes to Richard\u2019s cozy wooden abode and kicks the door down while he\u2019s blissfully unaware. Fiala and Franz\u2019s approach to horror requires nothing more than human characters acting on their nastiest urges. Aidan and Mia blame Grace for their mother\u2019s removal from parental pictures, making it clear they hold no compassion for their father\u2019s new flame. From frame one, there\u2019s zero mincing words. Aidan and Grace are not destined for friendship.\u00a0Motivated by bottomless levels of grief, the kids are at their best as Grace slowly devolves into her worst.<\/p>\n<p>As nights pass, mysteries pile higher than fresh roadside snowplow banks. Grace awakens in random locations (standing bedside <em>Paranormal Activity<\/em> style or laying down), memories of her father\u2019s repetition of \u201cRepent!\u201d 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, <em>The Lodge<\/em> continuously pushes characters to dangerous brinks with rabid intensity. A hangman\u2019s noose, a loaded revolver, a saint\u2019s painting &#8211; weapons of the unhinged that assure only the highest order of teeth-clenched dread as you realize just how sinister a film you\u2019re watching.<\/p>\n<h2>2. Riley Keough&#8217;s Climb Inside The Mouth Of Madness<\/h2>\n<div id=\"attachment_8095\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-8095\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8095\" src=\"http:\/\/blog-proxy.atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/the-lodge.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"563\" srcset=\"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/the-lodge.jpg 1000w, https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/the-lodge-300x169.jpg 300w, https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/the-lodge-768x432.jpg 768w, https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/the-lodge-500x282.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-8095\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Courtesy of Sundance Institute<\/p><\/div>\n<p>As fans voice their desires for horror to be more widely recognized by awards ceremonies, Riley Keough\u2019s performance in <em>The Lodge<\/em> is another \u201cGive Toni Collette an Oscar for <em>Hereditary<\/em>, you cowards&#8221; situation. Undoubtedly one of the year\u2019s best horror performances. Grace\u2019s childhood marred by death, emotional abuse and father\u2019s Bible-fanatic preaching creates constant character mistrust, just as Richard\u2019s children reflect upon researching Grace\u2019s family history online. Keough plays a woman attempting to move forward years later, still haunted by corpses with \u201cSin\u201d scribbled on duct tape placed across closed mouths. Her genuine desire to rebuild is lit ablaze by Fiala and Franz\u2019s proclivity to torment their already traumatized character, even as you see the cracks were only just papered over, never gone. That\u2019s when the fun begins.<\/p>\n<p>Keough\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s rapid descent into gaslit madness.<\/p>\n<h2>3. What\u2019s A Sophomore Slump?<\/h2>\n<p>Fiala and Franz prove themselves to be anything but one-trick ponies after creeping under our skin with <em>Goodnight Mommy<\/em>. Once again the filmmakers utilize maternal relationships with adversarial children, pitting adults versus pipsqueaks in a battle of unwavering wits &#8211; 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p><em>The Lodge<\/em> 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\u2019s Grace loses human touches over time (the jerky movements of a marionette, for example). It\u2019s Christmas horror that doesn\u2019t need monsters or slashers given how man\u2019s 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\u2019s meant to be. Can masochism be an art form? It\u2019s the only reality given how impressed I was by a film intent on making me feel as destroyed as possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Lodge is a methodically insidious and outstandingly tense entry into the \u201cChristmas Horror\u201d canon. Trust me. I\u2019ve 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":7114,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[58,52],"tags":[40,37],"class_list":["post-8054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-horror","category-review","tag-featuredpage","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8054"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8094,"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8054\/revisions\/8094"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atomtickets.com\/movie-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}