#142: The Lodgers
A slow gothic chiller that never ventures too deep
This review was originally posted to Twitter on July 21, 2019.
Initial release: September 8, 2017
Director: Brian O’Malley (no, not that one)
Maybe I’m cynical, but gothic horror film seems in decline. I’ve watched a lot of period horror flicks over the years and while there are some high points, most of them simply don’t achieve the heights of, say, The Innocents. Irish filmmaker Brian O’Malley’s The Lodgers doesn’t either.
(Does The Limehouse Golem count as gothic horror? I kind of think it’s more of a modernist serial killer flick set in Victorian England, but a case could probably be made. At any rate, The Others is probably the last really good traditionalist gothic horror film.)
This is a film that wears its influences on its sleeve, and while other films have done that and gotten away with it, it’s telling that the most interesting part of the film is also the least explained, drawing more from the likes of Lovecraft than Poe. (More on that soon.)
It’s 1920 somewhere in rural Ireland. Rachel and Edward, the only inhabitants of a crumbling manor house, have just turned 18. All their lives they’ve been under a terrible curse, one enforced by a mysterious, unexplained entity or entities. They have to follow a few rules to live in that house. The big one is to be in bed before midnight; number two is no visitors, ever. Number three is they can’t leave each other all alone (trips to the village for supplies are allowed.) Break the rules, bad stuff happens.
Rachel chafes under these rules and dreams of escape. Edward, for his part, is a sadsack reclusive weirdo who can’t abide bright light or even going outside ever, and he’s bought fully into the curse, which seems to demand an incestuous relationship of each generation of twins. You can see the influence from Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher:” you’ve got the incest themes, the crumbling house, the weird, controlling, environmentally-sensitive brother, the sister with a connection to the outside world via a male suitor who wants to get her out. Of course there’s other influences, like The Others with the windows boarded up and the near-total isolation from the outside world, or The Innocents with its fixation on purity. But these influences are all quite obvious to anyone who likes gothic fiction.
More interesting is the underlying menace that permeates the whole house and dogs the twins throughout the movie, with the mysterious lake nearby — and the other one the house seemingly sits on, just underneath a trapdoor in the main hall. Water features heavily in this film. Aside from the lake and the water under the house, water drips constantly from the walls when the curse is especially potent, and, curiously, drips upwards in the main hall, leaving mildew stains and rot on the ceiling.
We never really get a good idea of what the curse even is, or why it’s doomed this family to generations of identical incestuous twins. Eels seem to figure into it, but other than a few mild scares it feels like a feint. O’Malley, writing on Twitter, explains:
The climax, however, almost makes the slow burn worth it. It’s here that the themes of water, drowning, and the truth of the house’s relationship to the twins and their ancestors, finally come to a head, in a series of truly surreal sequences that seem influenced by David Lynch and cosmic horror.
After my review of Providence where I basically put both Alan Moore and Howard Philips Lovecraft into the dumpster where they live now, you might be surprised to see me talk about cosmic horror, but a lot of people mistake cosmic horror as being entirely Lovecraft’s domain, but he didn’t even really invent the genre. There are elements to his work that remain compelling after all these years, because they work — they’re out-of-left-field elements that defy traditional gothic tropes for something a little more modernist yet inexplicable. At the very least, we can say that a big part of Lovecraft’s influence — and of course that of his forebears like Robert Chambers — is that there are things out there that we cannot explain and that perhaps have no explanation, that exist outside the context of our experiences. “There’s some things got answers, and some that don’t,” as the saying goes.
To that end, this weird curse with weird eels and a weird lake and weird rules feel like a deliberately offbeat, weird fiction take on the traditional gothic mode that weird fiction was the heir to. More than the gothic trappings, more than the boring drama in the village that never gets resolved or the situation with the family lawyer that also goes unresolved, it’s this bizarre weird fiction element that makes this film slightly more than a boilerplate gothic chiller, even if it can’t really tie it all together in the end.
