Welcome to Awful Advent: a countdown of 13 Holiday Horror movies for the 13 days before Christmas
For this year’s seventh entry, a film that explores the true horror of the holidays—spending time with your religious family. It’s The Lodge!
A young woman is spending Christmas with her partner’s two children at their isolated winter lodge. After falling asleep watching movies together, they wake up to find the power out, the water off, and all their possessions—including food—missing from the house. She needs to solve the mystery of what is happening, but memories of her cult leader father start cropping up and it’s not clear that there is a rational explanation.
I’m going to be circumspect about this movie because I really liked it and I don’t want to spoil anything. I’ll admit to rolling my eyes here and there guessing at the inevitable twist ending, but then the movie would lean into those very explanations. Rather than make me exasperated that the movie was drawing out its inevitable reveal (as a forthcoming movie on this list did), it made me doubt my assumptions and get drawn back into the movie.
At the center of the film is Grace, a young woman who, as a child, was the lone survivor of a Christian cult that had been led by her father. The cult all committed suicide leaving Grace behind as the messenger. Now, years later, she’s had therapy and is on medication to keep her anxiety and hallucinations in check.
She’s fallen in love with Richard, a married man with two children. In fact, we start the film with the mother dropping the children off with Richard. Grace is only a shadow in the background or a figure walking away in various cutaways for a good portion of the first act.
Richard asks his wife to finalize their divorce because he wants to marry Grace. There follows a sudden and shocking act of violence that leaves the wife dead and then we’re at the mother’s funeral. The congregants release a lot of black balloons into the sky, but the daughter ties her balloon to a doll she has of her mother, preventing it from floating away. That night she’s inconsolable, telling her father, “You don’t understand! Now she’ll never go to heaven!”
Over Thanksgiving, Richard tells his children that he plans to marry Grace and they object because they blame her for their mother’s death. We cut to Christmas where Grace will be staying with the children at the family’s winter lodge while Richard goes back to town for a few days to take care of business. Grace is unnerved by the Christian iconography in the lodge and things are stressful with the kids, but it seems like progress is being made.
And then they wake up to find the house stripped bare, the power out, and their cell phones dead. Dad took the car and they’re trapped in the middle of a blizzard.
300 words ago I said I’d be “circumspect,” but all of this is setup. What follows is the story itself with the erupting tensions between Grace and the kids, her own trauma resulting from surviving her father’s cult, and the mystery of what has actually happened.
Something I found interesting that I don’t think the film intended was the portrayal of mainstream Christianity as just another cult. This is 100% a result of my having left the church almost 30 years ago and abandoned my faith almost 20 years ago, but any kind of religious practice just looks so strange to my eyes. After the mother’s funeral, all the congregants release black balloons into the sky, which is a practice I’d never seen before. And it’s all done in front of a giant cross (not unlike the one at the start of The Day of the Beast) which made it all more Expressionistic and odd. The daughter’s extreme reaction afterwards sounded like someone deeply indoctrinated into a cult insisting upon the cult’s interpretation of the world: these rules must be followed or she’ll be damned.
The film actively plays with the manipulations of faith as well. Grace (subtle name) is made uncomfortable by the religious iconography in the house because it reminds her of her cult upbringing and the daughter saying grace before dinner feels like an intentional act of violence against Grace. It’s not the daughter doing her routine pre-dinner action, it’s done because she knows how uncomfortable religion makes Grace.
Like I said, I think that’s me more than the movie. I saw similar threads in the conclusion to The Wicker Man where the sergeant is crying out to Jesus to save him while the islanders are raising their voices to their own god. They’re crying out to their god in hopes of having their wishes granted the same way he is, only his wish is to no longer be on fire. It’s not so much that one god triumphs over the other as physics persists regardless.
All of that aside, this is a really good movie. It’s creepy, it’s twisty, and it’s shocking when it needs to be—and it knows what to make shocking. I highly recommend it in general, but I don’t think it’s really a holiday horror movie. Even more than The Day of the Beast, the Christmas aspect of this movie is incidental. Instead, it’s a psychological horror film set at winter and maybe a bit too heavy for the purposes I tend to put holiday horror films to. This movie demands your attention so it’s not something you’d just have on casually and it’s not visually splashy (although it does look great) so it doesn’t work as background fodder for a holiday party.
So, while I recommend it, not for Christmas.
4/5 reverends raving about Revelations and resurrection
The Lodge is currently available to stream on Hulu
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