Hey, Alicia Silverstone! I haven’t seen Alicia Silverstone in years! I’m officially excited for this film. And … she blows her head off inside the five-minute mark. So much for the Alicia Silverstone reunion tour.
It takes a special kind of delusional for a dad to force grieving kids to spend time with the new missus. But there are levels of delusional, aren’t there? I mean there’s the delusional that comes when stepmom Grace (Riley Keough) fails to take her medication and then there’s a the delusional that dad (Richard Armitage) can essentially force remote, weather-impeded, Christmastime co-habitation between new wife and two sub-adult children who haven’t recovered from mom’s suicide. Who does that?
Seriously, Richard, your Thorin Oakenshield was more realistic about battling a dragon for a pile of treasure than this guy is about making stepmom and kids play nice. Taking them to the snowed-in wilderness and leaving them for a week by themselves is beyond witless; that’s just cruel.
And this is the plot of The Lodge. Basically, Cher from Clueless has grown up and her life sucks. She takes the kids, Aiden (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh) for a dad weekend and Thorin Oakenbrain chooses that moment to tell Cher he’s getting remarried to Grace, the dwarf trophy wife. Cher kills herself. The kids are not happy. Six months later, Oakenbrain rubs out half a thought and decides that taking trophy dwarf and the kids to The Lodge in winter and leaving them there is a really good idea. Clearly, Oakencrotch isn’t getting his best thoughts from upstairs.
Once Thorin leaves, the plot arrives. Slowly and surely, The Lodge becomes a psychological war of sorts pitting Grace against the tag team of Aiden and Mia. The Lodge prides itself on atmosphere so it can get away with a minimal plot and a mere suggestion of supernatural horror. The film shamelessly threw in a red herring or two like the fact that Grace as a child was herself the lone survivor of a suicide cult – why does that matter, movie? What relevance does it have to the current war of wills?
The Lodge is a film I wanted to enjoy but it left me with little more than an empty feeling. I felt abandoning the new wife to hostile kids was incredibly unfair to her; if I thought it unfair to trophy dwarf, however, to the children, I thought it amounted to child abuse. I’d Lodge a complaint, but it’s already there in the title.
Their vacation, the father did heist
Deciding that awkward sufficed
With a ghostly lose-lose
And a stepmom to choose
Shun the trophy and go for the ‘geist
Rated R, 108 Minutes
Director: Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz
Writer: Sergio Casci, Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz
Genre: Existential crises
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: People who like to guess
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Those capable of disappointment
