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It gets in your bones, right down to the marrow, and rattles them. But even with a final reveal that leads the film back into more predictable territory, The Lodge is a grim, ghastly thing to behold.
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There’s something wrong with their cabin, with the foreboding woods that surround them, certainly with how impossibly dark it seems to get this time of year. The Lodge is a profoundly despairing piece of work, and its snowed-in premise creates a particularly suffocating atmosphere of dread in which to strand the characters – most of all Keough, whose elusive cool eventually cracks under such subzero conditions. That Grace has an uncertain past with a doomsday cult only makes her more suspicious to Aidan and Mia, and their rightful anger at the way Grace’s arrival wrecked their household is heightened by a cocktail of other, more tangled emotions that come to roost when she’s left alone with them for a few days at a remote cabin.
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The kids, Aidan (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh), are understandably cold to Grace, even months later. Stationed somewhere between Hereditary‘s creeping, trauma-steeped terror and the uncanny aura of something like The Shining, The Lodge centers on Grace (Keough), who’s decided to marry the older Richard (Richard Armitage) after falling for him at some point early in the dissolution of his marriage to Laura (Alicia Silverstone, briefly). The Lodge, from Goodnight Mommy codirectors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, offers Keough one of her most chilling roles yet, in a film fiendishly calibrated to reflect its star’s spiritual disquiet at all levels. Her innate magnetism and propensity toward intricate, calculating characters also makes her an ideal match for the horror genre. Keough would have thrived in the silent film era. Keough’s characters are often terrifyingly unknowable, but the actress plays these ciphers with such intensity that watching her is never anything less than a hypnotic experience. Check her out in the first season of Starz’s The Girlfriend Experience, bringing spooky focus to the part of a high-end sex worker, or on screen as two very different kinds of den mothers with hidden depths in American Honey and Hold the Dark. Her characters are cold to the touch, detached and somewhat alien, miles away from the often grim circumstances in which they find themselves. There’s a haunted quality to Riley Keough, a soul-deep disenchantment she can gather in her shoulders and pour forward through heavy-lidded blue eyes. SEE IT: ‘The Lodge’ (In theaters, expanding through February)
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Fortune‘s here to help you navigate the week’s latest offerings, boiling all the entertainment out there down into distinct recommendations: should you see it, stream it, or skip it? Find out below.