Austrian directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala weave another elegant nightmare in their first English-language feature.
the Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala wove an elegant nightmare about a house in the woods, a cruel battle of wits and doppelgängers both real and imagined. Think of their new, English-language thriller, “The Lodge,” as a lesser but not ineffective mirror image to that earlier picture, which it echoes not only in its remote forest setting but also in the way it uses the language of horror to pry open a window into trauma and grief.
It begins on a chilly day, with a depressive Laura dropping off her teenage son, Aidan , and prepubescent daughter, Mia , at the home of their father, Richard . Richard wants to finalize their divorce; Laura breaks down in anguish. You might initially guess, from the peculiarities of the framing and the intensity of Silverstone’s performance, that Laura is the movie’s protagonist, although that quickly, startlingly turns out not to be the case.
With near-surgical delicacy, the directors shift the story’s perspective from Laura to Richard’s new fiancée, Grace . It feels like an act of transference. The scene that introduces Grace is quietly remarkable; previously glimpsed only as a blurred silhouette, she slips into the passenger seat of Richard’s car, waits a beat and then turns toward the backseat to greet Aidan and Mia — and us — for the first time.
There’s awkwardness and bad feeling all around; despite Richard’s insistence that the kids get to know their stepmom-to-be, they want nothing to do with her, partly out of loyalty to Laura and partly out of the suspicion that Grace, whose name hints at her long-ago fundamentalist upbringing, may not be entirely trustworthy. The hostility remains even after they all head into the mountains for the Christmas holidays.
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