The Lodge (2020)

The Lodge opens with a child watching her mother shoot herself behind a bathroom door. That's not a spoiler the film is shy about. Within the first five minutes, directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz have already told you exactly what kind of movie this is, and exactly how much mercy you should expect. None.

The Austrian duo first made their mark with Goodnight Mommy (2014), a film about twin boys who become convinced their bandaged mother is an impostor. The Lodge covers similar emotional territory but expands its canvas. Where Goodnight Mommy was a claustrophobic two-hander, this film has the audacity to place its horror inside Christmas itself.

The Setup: A Family Grieving Badly

Richard Armitage plays Richard, a father who wants to bring his two children, Aiden (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh), closer to Grace (Riley Keough), his new girlfriend. His plan: a family Christmas at a remote lodge, all four of them together. His ex-wife has just died by suicide after learning of his plans to remarry. His children despise Grace. His new girlfriend is the sole survivor of a religious cult mass suicide her father led.

Richard leaves for work after a few days. He says he'll be back soon. He won't be back soon.

What follows is a chamber piece about gaslighting, grief, and what happens when you weaponize someone's deepest trauma against them. The children know about Grace's past. They use that knowledge with a precision that is genuinely frightening, because it reads as something children could actually do.

Riley Keough Carries the Film

Keough commits entirely to this role and the film would not work without her. Grace is not written as a simple victim. She's simultaneously sympathetic and unsettling, fragile and dangerous, a woman still half inside the cult she escaped. Keough communicates all of this without ever making a speech about it.

The directors deliberately kept Keough separated from Martell and McHugh during pre-production, while simultaneously encouraging the two child actors to bond through shared activities like rock climbing and ice skating. The result is a visible triangle of distrust on screen. Aiden and Mia have each other. Grace has no one.

Martell, who appeared in It (2017), brings a particular kind of adolescent cruelty to Aiden. He isn't a monster. He's a grieving thirteen-year-old who has found a target. That's harder to watch than a monster.

Is This Actually a Christmas Movie?

In the loosest sense, yes. In the sense that anyone reaches for it while trimming the tree, no. But the Christmas setting is not incidental.

Fiala and Franz use Christmas's dual nature as religious ritual and family obligation as the substrate for their horror. The lodge is festooned with crosses and religious imagery before the family arrives. Grace's cult background involved extreme Christian piety, self-punishment, and visions of the afterlife. When the children start staging what appears to be a shared death, they're essentially reactivating the cult's belief system inside Grace's mind, in a building already full of crosses, during a holiday built around resurrection and sacrifice.

The film's most disturbing sequence involves Grace singing "Nearer, My God, to Thee" while preparing what is clearly a ritual. The hymn is best known as what the Titanic's band allegedly played as the ship sank. In this context it lands like a hammer.

How Fiala and Franz Build Dread

The pacing is deliberately slow. Some viewers will find this punishing. The directors are less interested in jump scares than in the sustained feeling that something is wrong with reality itself. Mirrors, doll's house replicas of the lodge's interior, and unsettling repetition of religious imagery all accumulate into a texture of wrongness before anything explicitly horrifying happens.

The script, originally written by Sergio Casci and substantially rewritten by the directors including a new ending, works through misdirection. Events that seem supernatural reveal themselves as human cruelty. Events that seem like cruelty reveal themselves as something else entirely. The film earns its finale because it has laid its groundwork patiently.

Cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis, who also shot The Lobster (2015), frames the lodge as both beautiful and hostile. Wide shots of the snow-covered exterior make the building look like the only warm thing in the world. Then the power goes out.

What the Film Gets Right About Trauma

The Lodge takes seriously the idea that trauma doesn't disappear; it waits. Grace has rebuilt a functional life. She goes to therapy. She loves Richard. She tries with the children. None of that insulation holds when someone who knows exactly where her psychological fault lines are begins pressing on them systematically.

The film doesn't offer a clean reading of whether Grace is delusional from the start or driven mad by external forces. Both readings are supported by the text. That ambiguity is the point.

When the ending arrives, it is brutal and earned and sad in a way that lingers. Not sad like a weeper. Sad like watching something inevitable happen.