Directed by - Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala
Cast - Riley Keough, Jaeden Martell, Lia McHugh, Alicia Silverstone, Richard Armitage
Genre - Horror/Thriller
Streaming On - Amazon Prime Video
"You and you alone hold the key. And you know how to open the door."
The Lodge is horror cum psycological thriller directed by the renowned horror directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. The movie released in Russia in 2019 but it was released worldwide in 2020. The Lodge is about a family who have just went over for a family retreat to their winter cabin over the holidays, where the children are going to spend time with their Father`s girlfriend for the first time. But the father is forced to abruptly depart for work, leaving his two children in the care of his new girlfriend, Grace (Riley Keough). Stuck and isolated together, just as relations finally begin to thaw between the trio, strange and frightening events threaten to summon demons from Grace`s dark past.
The Lodge starts building the characters one by one and setting the plot very interestingly. The cinematgrophy and the sound effects in the starting are exceptional and any viewer with a weak heart would surely switch off their screens! The set up in the starting seemed gut-wrenching, the plot was seemingly building up but then by the time it reaches half it`s duration, everything fades away. The cinematography is exceptional throughout the movie but the plot, well that`s pretty much missing. Other than the pretentious cinematography and a sound track that can make your adrenelaine skyrocket, this movie has nothing, it has no plot and no script whatsoever. The ambiguity that the movie tries to create gets too much and a large part of the film just does not make sense. The movie uses so many symbols and symbolic props which do not seem to make sense, its a horror film where instead of getting scared you are left wondering about what is really happening?
The character build-up goes to the trash 20 minutes into the movie and by the end of it, the whole movie seems unbearable. The movie tried to so hard to be a psycological thriller, that it didn`t even care to provide little and cliche scares that any average horror film can provide. The set up in the starting seemed gut-wrenching but then it just faded away. The actors did a fine job but with a script like this, there was not much they could do. All in all its a very disappointing film.
JRating : 4/10
JRev : You don`t appreciate the art of a good genre-plot until you see one pulled off this poorly.
Trailer Available @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCLOqdzAP9E