I mentioned the most recent entry into the Scream franchise in my last blog. Part of the reason Wes Craven made Scream 4 (and now other creators have made Scream 5) is that horror, as a genre, has changed significantly since its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s.
When Scream revived the genre for the screen (it never went away in print), it also revived the creativity among screen writers to find new, original ways to horrify and frighten. A welcome addition to the genre was the manifestation of mental illness as the villain in horror and psychological thrillers. Movies like Hereditary and The Babadook terrified audiences with horrific examinations of grief, while movies like Melancholia and Shutter Island dispensed with the jump scares and focused on the terror of having your mind and emotions not under your own control.
Some of these excellent films are instances where the mental illness itself is the villain (Black Swan), and some are instances where mental illness drives otherwise good people to harm others (Split).
2019’s The Lodge is a masterful, and terrifying, example of both.
More than anything, this film is about unintended consequences and how we don’t really “see” other people and the demons they live with.
The first scenes are devoted to a father of two, Richard, telling his wife that he plans to divorce her. He has met someone else and he’s like to marry her. The wife, played by Alicia Silverstone, waits for him to leave with the children, and promptly commits suicide.
But this moment of despair is not the subject of the movie. It’s just the inciting incident.
Six months later, Richard tells his two children, Mia and Adrian, they will be going to the family’s remote winter cabin to spend Christmas… with Grace. The woman he left their mother for. The woman who, in their mind, caused their mother’s suicide.
You can see why they’d want revenge, especially Aiden, who tried without luck to comfort his emotionally distraught younger sister, while their father did nothing.
But Grace isn’t some airhead their dad met at a bar. She is the only surviving member of a suicide cult, raised under the leadership of a charismatic lunatic who emphasized physical punishment for repentance of sins. He also forced them all to pay the ultimate price for their sins… suicide.
Grace was the only survivor and it’s not clear if an adult neglected to poison her like the other children or if she simply declined to kill herself. Richard met her when he wanted to document her story for a book.
When we meet Grace, two important things become clear: 1) She takes prescription medication twice a day without fail, and 2) The children absolutely despise her.
Richard then leaves Grace and the children in the cabin. Alone. And the children will have their revenge.
It’s hard to say what Aidan thought would happen when he drugged Grace and hid all her possessions (including her medication).
I can’t imagine what this grief-stricken 13-year-old boy thought would happen when he tried to convince a PTSD-afflicted survivor of a death cult that she was indeed already dead, and the three of them were in purgatory.
It’s not hard to see where he got the idea. He watched The Others, just like I did. And he decided to punish Grace, to make her think she was in purgatory for the sin she had committed against his mother. Against him and his sister.
But he’s just a boy. He could not possibly have known what his actions would bring forth.
It is never said what Grace’s pills are. But as we see her desperation to find them and her rapid descent into psychotic episodes and fugue states, I suspect they were antipsychotics.
It is only after they see Grace sitting outside in sub-zero temperatures in house clothes (they hid all the coats and shoes), clutching her little dog who froze to death, that they understand they have gone too far.
Aidan wraps a coat around her shoulders and says, “We were just pretending Grace. We’re not dead or in purgatory. We were just pretending.”
It is far, far too late.
Even if Aidan had read her medication bottle, would he have known what the long word meant? Probably not. If he were older, would he have had a better understanding that Grace may not view her surviving the cult to be a good thing? I don’t know.
The Lodge is marketed as a horror movie and it is certainly horrifying. But it is ultimately a tragedy of children lashing out in pain, having no idea of the consequences. Because how could they?
It’s hard to blame the children, or even Grace’s mental illness. After all, if kept under control with medication, therapy, and a support network, she would have been fine. And so would everyone else.
No, if there is a villain in this movie, it is Richard. He divorced his loving and faithful wife for a much younger and prettier woman, expecting his children to just go along with it. He brushed off their grief at their mother’s suicide, shoehorning this other woman into their family despite his children’s clear opposition.
Then he left them alone in an isolated cabin. With a woman they hated. Who was on antipsychotics.
He knew everything about her experience. He had the footage from the cult, the police reports, everything. He knew exactly how tenuous Grace’s grip on reality was. But “it’ll be fine.”
For Richard, everything will always be fine. Except this time it wasn’t. And Richard should have been able to see it coming.
Lord knows, his children didn’t.