Movie of the Week: The Lodgers

Alexa: I love a good gothic romance, but unfortunately I would not classify “The Lodgers” as one of them. Neither particularly scary nor romantic, the movie suffers most from feeling half-finished. It’s an intriguing concept with a lot of potential, but the script merely skims the surface of every facet of the story, resulting in a flimsy narrative. The “romance,” such as it is, feels rushed and lackluster, so it’s difficult to get invested in Rachel and Sean’s connection. The mythology behind the family, the house and its mysterious rules is never fully explored, so any revelations feel rushed despite the film overall suffering from sluggish pacing. The “twist” is telegraphed so strongly early on that it sucks any suspense out of the final reveal. (The family has lived in the house for generations and one of the rules dictates they can’t let any strangers in. There are only so many ways a family trapped in one house can have children.) The movie’s greatest strengths are its direction and production design. If nothing else, the atmosphere is distinctly eerie and ominous, and it’s stunning to look at. But if supernatural period romances are your thing, I’d recommend the superior “Crimson Peak” instead.

Joel: When it comes to the checklist of a gothic horror story, this movie checks pretty much every single box. Spooky old rundown house? Check. Mysterious, ancient curse that nobody wants to talk directly about? Check. A time period that allows for a certain architectural design and fashion sense? Check. At any second you’d expect someone to reveal an ancient passageway behind a bookcase, or a ton of fog obscuring the moonlight. The Lodgers knows what kind of movie it wants to be and doesn’t shy away from it. Every trope of the genre feels leaned into, ensuring there is no mistake of the look and feel that we’re going for here.

Visually, the movie succeeds in spades. Everything from the set design to the costume helps to construct the mood of the movie. The movie moves with a slow, deliberate pace, but it’s masterfully directed so that rather that feeling dragged out or boring, the pacing keeps everything unsettling for the entire runtime of the movie. You can feel a love for the genre in every frame as The Lodgers works as a sort of love letter to the look, feel and style of this particular genre. Unfortunately, the story feels like it’s trying to be a part of the same love letter, only to fail in most of the places that the visual style succeeds.

This isn’t a genre, known for providing it’s audience with all the answers, and as much as it personally bugs me that the “curse” or “stain on the family” is kept deliberately vague with no real explanation, I can understand that this is part of the genre. However, the idea of something being deliberately vague is a well you can only go to so many times in a single movie, and The Lodgers goes well past that limited number. What’s with the eel? Is that just the scariest water animal they could think of? Why are these rules so inconsistent? What were the lodgers exactly? These water demon/ancestors/possible scary mermaid show up finally, but I don’t get what’s driving them. Why are the powerless during the day except for when it’s convenient for the plot for them to be omnipotent? The pearl necklace that magically turned into bones and feathers, who did that? I assume that was the lodgers, but why would they not want the house to get paid for? Isn’t that how they keep getting new twins? What’s with the bird? It feels like there’s no coherent reason for a bird to be involved in this water based plot at all, except for the fact that ravens and crows tend to be in gothic horror movies so this one needed a bird too.

Ultimately it feels like this script lucked out with a better director than the material ever deserved. Too many creepy, mysterious ideas are brought up, leaving none of them very well explored and the whole thing feeling a little half finished with too many plot threads leading nowhere. I’d be interested in seeing what director Brian O’Malley taking another stab at this particular genre, because he clearly has an eye for what makes it work. When the movie is working, it has a great atmosphere, but you can only do so much with a story that has this many roads to nowhere.

Jason: I have a deep love for “weird fiction”. This is the style of short stories for which authors like H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Robert E. Howard, and Algernon Blackwood are so famous. Weird fiction usually involves a short, contained supernatural story with few characters and even fewer explanations. Answers are not what you’re looking for in a so-called weird tale. What is important is that you’re left with a sense of wonder about the human condition through the unexplainable. I feel that The Lodgers is a modern take on this particular style of storytelling. There is so much that is going on in the background of this film that is never touched on; so much that has happened that we don’t get to explore. And yet, I still got that great tingly feeling of dread as the story played out. In a more traditional story, we would have gotten flashbacks about the origins of this curse, more exposition about Sean, his injury, and the war, and more drawn out scenes showing Sean and Rachel growing more attached. But the fact that we got so little of this makes it feel even more creepy. I understand Alexa’s point about some of it feeling rushed, but if this were in writing, it would not be a novel, it would be a short story. And with a short story, you just don’t have the space to go into all the details. And I disagree with Alexa’s categorization of this story as a romance. It has romantic relationships but the tale itself is about as romantic as Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”.

The production of this film are awe inspiring. The direction, set design, costuming, music, everything. It all played so well together to make a creepy and unsettling atmosphere. I would like to see more from this writer/director combo.