Performances prop up The Lodge
Review The Lodge (R16, 108 mins) Directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★1⁄2
The saying, ‘‘you can’t make a good film without a good script’’ is trotted out so often and so confidently that we all eventually gave up even asking whether it is strictly true. And the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it’s even the case.
Who can say whether Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now had a good script or not?
I’ve watched that film a dozen times and I’m still not entirely sure what even happens.
So much of the film is people staring helplessly across rooms and canals, haunted by visions they can’t explain and memories they can’t live with.
On the page, Don’t Look Now is a mess that very few ‘‘script assessors’’ would see any merit in. But, Roeg knew how it fitted together. And, since Roeg was already an acclaimed and trusted director, he got to shoot what is still quite definitely one of my favourite films of all time.
So it seems to me that the cult of the ‘‘good script’’ has at least a few exceptions to prove the rule. Or, and this is probably my point, sometimes it is the completed film that makes the script seem great in hindsight, when what was on the page could just as easily have yielded exactly the sort of friendless mutt you’ll find lurking down the back end of Netflix, or spilling out of sale bins at The Warehouse.
As legendary screenwriter William Goldman famously put it, in the movie business: ‘‘nobody knows anything’’.
And if nobody knows anything about what makes a comedy funny, or a horror scary, or a potential major feature into a studio bankrupting disaster then, trust me, they understand even less about what makes a psychological horror work.
Take The Lodge. Writer/ directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala already have the grimly compelling Goodnight Mommy on their CVs, so I guess somebody was happy to bet on them for another spin in the director’s chair. But with so much of what makes this film not on the page at all, it must have taken them some convincing.
The new, young, wife of a widower goes to meet his children for the first time at a deserted and snow-bound chalet (I guess ‘‘lodge’’ sounded scarier). He, oh so unexpectedly, gets called back to work in the city, leaving his children and spouse to battle it out with storms, failing generators and mostly each other.
The kids don’t like new mum. And, it transpires, she doesn’t like them much either, especially if they don’t give back her antipsychotic medication.
All of that sounds like a promising setup. But in The Lodge, this is basically the entire first hour. When the conflict is resolved and the new family start to work together to survive, The Lodge becomes a lot less interesting.
What saves the film are a couple of extraordinary performances, from Riley Keough (Logan Lucky) as the hapless, often wordless, Grace, and from Jaeden Martell (Knives Out) as the eldest son and Grace’s chief tormentor.
Those two, plus some morethan-competent cinematography – from Yorgos Lanthimos’ favourite shooter Thimios Bakatakis – and a decent shift in the edit suite to keep the scares coming in a pleasingly organic fashion.
It all adds up to a film that is more than the sum of the parts and a testament to the fact that sometimes you just have to let filmmakers make films, and not worry too much if they also managed to get it in writing.
The Lodge is now available to watch via Lightbox, YouTube and iTunes.