This post was written by Emmanuel Carrillo.

Well, there were only eight of us in the movie theatre. To be fair, it was a random time, but the mood was very much that of people going to see a stupid scary movie that is easy to laugh at. A few minutes into the movie and it seemed like this might, unfortunately, be the case, that we were indeed trapped in a dumb movie. It had some goofy kids doing stuff that’s vaguely spooky, separated parents having an awkward conversation in a claustrophobic kitchen, and ten minutes of shots which slowly zoom in. Two of the people in the theatre spent the first twenty minutes laughing, which is fairly rude, but I mean they did make up a quarter of the attendees. The premise of the movie is that this man Richard takes his kids, Aidan the teenager and sensitive little sister Mia, up to a cabin for Christmas to get to know his new fiancée, Grace. Using his big ol’ brain, he decides to leave them there together and head home to do some work. Very awkward in any scenario, “Hey kids, this is your new mommy. Go play in the snow and cuddle with her while you watch movies together as if you weren’t strangers!” What adds to the awkwardness is that Richard met his fiancée while writing an exposé on a religious suicide cult which, lo and behold, was run by Grace’s father, and (sort-of-a-spoiler) his ex-wife and the mother of his children committed suicide after learning about his impending marriage. And it’s a horror movie, so you better believe we saw this happen in great detail.

After this, the kids decide to blame the tragedy on their father’s new fiancé, you know, the one who barely escaped a death cult and carries immense trauma from it (of course it couldn’t be daddy’s fault for leaving his beloved wife for a younger, emotionally vulnerable woman). Anyway, fast forward to the cabin in the mountains and dad is gone. Things start getting muddy. Events don’t seem to add up in rational time, things (everything) go(es) missing, and a snowstorm knocks the power out. Cabin fever coupled with missing medication leads Grace in and out of dream states, hallucinating the aftermath of the cult’s mass suicide and her dead father telling her to repent. This may seem fairly cliché, but it’s actually crafted in a very disorienting manner. As Grace’s state deteriorates and the atmosphere in the cabin goes from bad to worse, the audience is left with three possibilities for what is actually going on: 1) Grace is led by dark and otherworldly forces in her sleep and sabotages the cabin on their behalf 2) Aidan (edgelord extraordinaire) and Mia are gaslighting Grace because they still blame her for their mother’s death 3) they all died in their sleep and are in purgatory.

By this point, the theatre had become silent. I won’t spoil the end because part of the fun is feeling like you yourself are also suffering delusions (“no, she is a sweet little girl, the evil ghost of Grace’s dad must be doing all this!”) but things get really ugly really fast. You’re left with that feeling you get in your stomach right after you throw up, like you feel empty but in the way an old metallic refrigerator that needs a deep scrubbing feels empty. See, sometimes there are situations where everyone is in the wrong, like really wrong, and there is no redemption. And this movie gets to that state. It ends up in the third panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, the one where everyone is sad and tortured by demons and God is nowhere to be found.

I don’t think there’s really a deep meaning to this movie except maybe that cults are bad and that trauma needs to be taken seriously. Oh, and it’s probably unethical to leave your wife for a deeply troubled woman you met while writing a book about her terrible childhood. But honestly, The Lodge is mostly a movie about ordinary people facing extraordinary cruelty. I personally think that really ugly things can be beautiful even if they make your face twist up in disgust and your heart sink with the weight of naïve disillusionment. I recommend it if you’re in the mood for some aesthetic schadenfreude, or just wanna feel bad for a couple of hours.