If just watching the trailer for The Lodge had you on the edge of your seat, I can understand why maybe you’re not ready to watch the whole film, especially in a dark theater. The psychological thriller, from the directors of Goodnight Mommy Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, stars Riley Keough as Grace, the young soon-to-be-stepmom and former member of a cult run by her dad. The movie starts with one hell of a gruesome scene and only gets better from there. So if you’re not willing to check out the whole creepy film, keep reading to see all the details you’re going to miss.
The story starts with Laura (Alicia Silverstone) taking her kids (Jaeden Martell and Lia McHugh) to their dad’s (Richard Armitage) house. Upon arriving, Richard tells Laura that it’s time to finalize their divorce because he wants to marry Grace (Keough), and Laura can’t handle it. She returns home and promptly puts a bullet in her mouth.
The story fast-forwards six months to when Richard tells the kids that the three of them and Grace are going to spend Christmas at their Winter home (the lodge, obviously), and despite the fact that the kids absolutely don’t want to go because they hate Grace, they’re forced to go anyways. Before they leave, though, Aiden and Mia (Martell and McHugh, respectively) do some digging into Grace’s background and find that she’s the sole survivor of a cult run by her father; all the members died by suicide. The kids watch an old video of the cult that show Grace’s dad preaching about the need to repent before it cuts to Grace showing the dead bodies. Sufficiently creepy.
Related: Too Scared to See Gretel & Hansel? Here Are All the Spooky Spoilers
The unhappy family – plus Grace’s dog, Grady – makes their way to the lodge in the snow, and Richard drops them all off to go back to the city for work. Grace and the kids fall asleep in front of the TV one night with the gas heater on, and the next morning they have no power, and all their things have gone missing, including whatever pills Grace is taking to keep her mentally stable.
She effectively loses her sh*t on the kids, but they’re just as scared as she is. And then they realize the dog is missing, too. As Grace quickly starts a downward spiral without her meds, she decides she’s going to try to walk to the nearest town to get help. But after hours of walking through feet of snow, she ends up right back at the lodge.
Here’s where it really starts to get weird, though. In front of the house, buried in the snow, Grace finds a memorial of sorts that looks like it’s dedicated to the kids – as if they’d died. Aiden tells her he thinks they did, and then they suddenly have a local news bulletin that says the three of them died when a gas heater in the house malfunctioned. Grace refuses to believe it’s true, but Aiden tries to show her they’re all dead by “hanging” himself in the stairwell. He and Mia keep telling her they need to repent (just like her cult-leader father used to) and insisted they were stuck in purgatory because they’d died in the house.
Here is where you get quite possibly the saddest part of the whole movie – Grace finds her dog outside frozen and dead, and she just sits on the front porch holding him. Mia profusely apologizes for leaving the door open and letting him out, but Grace won’t come back inside. Realizing that Grace has hit the point of no return because she’s off her meds and is now convinced they’re all dead, Aiden and Mia admit that they set the whole thing up.
But it’s too late.
Grace comes back in the house and kneels on burning firewood to repent. She keeps chanting about how they all need to repent, so the kids hide in the attic of the house. The next morning, as Richard is on his way back to the house for Christmas, Grace corners the kids in the attic and tells Mia that she needs to burn her doll to repent. Just then, you think Richard has shown up just in time to be the knight in shining armor, but Grace comes down the stairs toward him, waving the gun he gave her for protection and claiming that she needs to repent and basically threatens to shoot herself since she’s already dead. When she does, though, there’s no bullet. She turns the gun on Richard instead and shoots him, this time putting a bullet in his head.
Aiden and Mia try to escape, but the car gets stuck in the snow. The movie closes with the three of them – plus Richard’s body – sitting at the dinning table singing “Nearer My God to Thee.” When the song ends, Grace puts duct tape over all their mouths, with “SIN” written on it (just like all the dead bodies from the cult), and the last thing you see is the revolver with two very visible bullets.
