THE LODGERS (2017)

Studio:       Epic Pictures
Director:    Brian O’Malley
Writer:       David Turpin
Producer:  Ruth Treacy, Julianne Ford
Stars:     Charlotte Vega, Bill Milner, Eugene Simon, Deirdre O’Kane, Moe Dunford, Roisin Murphy, David Bradley

Review Score:

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Summary:

Twin siblings find their family’s dark secret threatened with exposure when one breaks the rules of the haunted house that binds them together.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

In 1920s rural Ireland, fraternal twins Rachel and Edward live alone in a family mansion, bound by mysterious rules that require being in bed by midnight and never allowing a stranger through the door. Rachel upsets Edward when, on the eve of their eighteenth birthday, she nearly misses the midnight bell by spending too much time at a nearby lake. Edward, who never leaves the mansion, forces Rachel to apologize to the unseen entities that dwell beneath a floorboard hatch in the foyer.

On her way into the village to buy goods from Maura Nally’s store, Rachel spies local hooligan Dessie accosting Maura’s daughter Kay. Meanwhile, Kay’s brother Sean, who now wears a wooden leg, returns home from the war and is shunned as a traitor by Dessie’s cohorts.

Sean intervenes when Dessie gives Rachel trouble outside the store. Attracted to Rachel, Sean follows her home. Rachel reciprocates his interest, but insists he not come to her house.

Edward finds a crow caught in the mansion’s chimney. Edward removes the bones of his mother’s old lovebirds from a birdcage and places the crow inside.

Rachel learns from a letter that their family’s solicitor Bermingham plans to visit because their trust is empty and he wants them to sell their estate. Edward claims that the entities will never allow it.

Rachel laments that never leaving and never knowing another soul is no way to live, saying that she no longer wants to go on like this. Edward protests that he will die if Rachel leaves him.

Rachel begins having regular visions of ghostly bodies rising from the lake as well as haunting her inside the house. Rachel also begins fantasizing about Sean. Rachel has a particularly traumatic experience when an eely fish appears in the bathtub with her, despite it not being after midnight.

Sean watches from a distance when Bermingham arrives at the estate. Rachel refuses to allow the solicitor inside. Rachel passes a pearl necklace to Bermingham to temporarily placate him regarding their extensive debt. However, she refuses to let Bermingham sell a silver locket with her parents’ pictures.

Rachel catches Sean spying on her. She tells him to come back in the morning. Rachel and Edward later have an awkward conversation about how their attachment to the presences in the house has intensified now that they are of age.

When Rachel meets Sean at the lake, she tells him how Edward witnessed their parents’ suicides in that water. Edward was never the same afterward. Rachel remembers her mother through the silver locket that she placed around Rachel’s neck before her death. Rachel goes on to say that for two centuries, the parents in each incarnation of their family always drowned themselves in that lake.

Rachel asks Sean if he will help her escape. They kiss and begin undressing each other until Rachel is frightened by another vision of bodies rising from the water.

Rachel explains to Sean that her family built the house to hide their shame, but the shame took supernatural shape to punish them. Sean tells Rachel her family legend is just a story, even though she expresses her fear that she will suffer the same fate as her mother and other ancestors. Recognizing his unwillingness to believe her, Rachel curtly dismisses Sean.

Bermingham angrily returns to the house to show Edward that the pearl necklace Rachel gave him is now a string of lovebird bones. Edward stabs Bermingham and throws him down the hatch.

Dessie and his cohorts brutally beat Sean as he walks home through the woods. Maura and Kay end up treating Sean back at their store’s adjoining home.

Edward angrily confronts Rachel when she comes home, demanding to know whom she was with. Rachel insists that she is leaving the next day with or without Edward, refusing to become what their parents did.

As her haunting visions intensify, Rachel dreams of kissing Sean as if underwater, even though they are both naked in midair. Sean becomes Edward in the nightmare.

Rachel runs into the village to find Sean. Maura angrily dismisses her. Rachel throws her silver locket on the floor as payment for her debts, although Maura warns Kay to not touch it.

Kay returns the locket to Rachel in the woods. Rachel confesses to Kay that all of her ancestors were twins and they came to this place to shut themselves away. Rachel tells Kay that she thought Sean could help her break free of the family curse.

Rachel and Kay flee when Dessie and his cohorts try capturing them. Rachel runs to the lake. There, she sees a vision of Edward watching their parents die and discovers that their father actually drowned their mother before his suicide.

Rachel returns home to Edward, who starts referring to himself as “we.” Rachel points out that his crow is not a real bird and it vanishes. Edward responds, “you’ll see what we see” and states his desire to impregnate her with the immortality of their family line. Rachel enrages her possessed brother by lying that she made herself a whore for Sean in order to be free of Edward. Edward knocks Rachel unconscious.

Thinking she is now impure, Edward moves to murder his sister after placing her on a bed. When he realizes she is still a virgin, Edward instead prepares to have sex with her.

Sean arrives at the house and interrupts Edward. The two young men fight. Edward is stabbed and Sean ends up pinned to the ground by a knife through his hand.

The clock strikes midnight. Water pours from the floorboard hatch. Ghostly bodies of Edward and Rachel’s ancestors, all of whom resemble the twins, rise from the water.

Rachel recovers and comes to Sean’s rescue. However, they are unable to leave the house when they discover the front door won’t open. Rachel is suddenly pulled into the watery hatch.

Sean swims into the water to save Rachel. He sees that the underwater realm is a mirror image of the house but upside-down. Sean finds Rachel entranced, but the ghosts pull Sean away from her and he drowns.

The ghosts confront Rachel. Rachel swims away and emerges in the lake outside. Rachel returns to the house to find Edward dying from his stab wound.

Edward tells Rachel he is sorry “they” took Sean. He asks if they can be together now. Rachel tells him no, adding that she only returned to say goodbye. Rachel takes back her locket and kisses Edward on his forehead. The twins exchange I love yous. Rachel promises that their mother and father will come for Edward. She then leaves her brother to die.

The crow watches Rachel as she walks away from the estate. Rachel places the locket on a tombstone on her way out.

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Review:

What comes to mind when the words “gothic ghost story” are mentioned?  Despite fatal faults in all other regards, “The Lodgers” may well be among the best visual representations of what that term entails.  Quiet moodiness bleeds profusely, to the point of being cinematically overwhelming frankly, from cobwebbed candelabras, dust-crusted banisters, and more moldy wallpaper peeling from shadowed stone than could fill fifty Castle Draculas.  Unfortunately, this gorgeously haunting presentation hopelessly defeats itself fighting an unwinnable war to find a suspenseful story worth telling.

Blind is by and large the optimal way to go into most movies.  Knowing as little as possible neutralizes expectations, tempers anticipation, and frees fiction to create an experience uninfluenced by individual preconceptions.

“The Lodgers” however, exposes its frustratingly thin substance with such confounding stubbornness, many of the minutes spent watching it are preoccupied by a struggle to decipher what it is even about, either thematically or otherwise.  Here, having a leg up on the content awards an unmistakable advantage in figuring out the film when it fails to make its narrative known.

Fraternal twins Rachel and Edward live alone in a remote Irish mansion where their ancestors similarly brooded for two centuries.  We later learn that Rachel and Edward’s parents, their parents’ parents, and their parents’ parents’ parents all committed suicide by drowning in a nearby lake, dooming the siblings to be next in line for this unspoken curse.

The adult orphans are strangely bound to their house through mysterious rules they remind themselves of by weirdly singing a creepy nursery rhyme with some seeming regularity.  Or, more likely, the song is sung because an echoing children’s chorus is a cheaply applied fright film staple.  Regardless, these rules require Rachel and Edward to be in bed before the clock strikes midnight and to never allow a stranger through the mansion’s doors.

What is the consequence of breaking the rules?  It isn’t entirely clear at first, and doesn’t entirely wash in retrospect either, yet it involves a floorboard hatch in the foyer filled with sentient water dripping toward the ceiling.

Older villagers whisper about Rachel and Edward’s dark family secret while younger hooligans are busy hassling local youth Sean as a traitor since his recent return from the war.  Rachel and Sean set a record for lightning quick connections when one intervention leads to romance.  This in turn inspires jealousy in Edward, whose incestuous interest in his sister links directly to their ties with the house.  With all three points on this odd love triangle sharpened, the stage is set for a tug-of-war among this trio as well as the ghostly entities swimming underneath the mansion.

“The Lodgers” learned its lessons from the same school of slow-burn spookiness as “The Quiet Ones” (review score), “The Others,” “The Innkeepers,” and similar stiff-lipped chillers with titles along the lines of “The Somethings.”  Impressively imposing in its imagery from title card to end credits, “The Lodgers” nevertheless skips all opportunities to energize its look with lively characters, emotional engagement, or an intricate mystery that a captive imagination might mull over.  The film commands attention only through the eyes, leaving such depressing drabness in its wake, intrigue on any other level has no source of sustenance.

Poetically obtuse theatricality obscures everything else the film might be trying to accomplish.  David Turpin’s screenplay so hotly desires to be a supernatural “Wuthering Heights” that it comically chokes on pretentious period dialogue, overemphasizing language like “young lady,” “chicanery,” and “good day, sir.”

Conversational exchanges involve respondents repeating the sentence just said, punctuating pomposity with curious musings more commonly found in a lovelorn preteen’s diary.  These are three such examples where the cast may as well have gone all the way by pressing the backs of their hands to their foreheads while speaking:

“It’s wrong.”
Reply: “How can fate be wrong?”

“What’s worse than hatred?”
Reply: “Love can be worse than hatred.”

“We’re all cursed to die.”
Reply: “No one is cursed to die.  We’re cursed to live.”

Had any onscreen personality applied the same passion that the script hollowly pursues, perhaps “The Lodgers” could locate a pulse.  Flat lines characterize the mouths on each face as well as the audience’s heart rate while passively observing sexual encounters absent of steam or environments devoid of true dread.

Combined with uncomfortable implications, confused editing that jumps to parallel plots at inopportune intervals, and secondary roles serving no useful purpose (Kay, anyone?), the movie makes for a rickety ride through a routine exercise in dull horror.  Undeniably sleek style aside, “The Lodgers” at least never truly loses you, only because it never has you to begin with.

Review Score:  45

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