The Lodge

• The Lodge was shot over 35 days in February–March 2018 in and around Montreal, Quebec — including Harrington — using a golf resort clubhouse closed for the winter season as the title lodge, not a Manitoba location.
• Directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala shot the film in chronological sequence specifically so Riley Keough could track Grace's psychological unraveling scene by scene.
• Riley Keough joined the cast in October 2017 after meeting the directors on Skype and in person; Franz has said the deciding factor was the immediate creative trust they felt with her, not a specific prior role.
• The film had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 25, 2019.
• Neon acquired U.S. distribution rights and gave the film a limited theatrical release on February 7, 2020, after an originally planned November 2019 date got pushed back.

Aiden and Mia never actually staged anything — Grace experienced the entire haunting as a psychotic break triggered by withdrawal from her medication and childhood trauma resurfacing under isolation. The film's subjective POV makes this indistinguishable from the 'real' explanation, and that ambiguity is the point.

Grace was already dead before Richard left for the lodge. Everything that follows is her purgatorial loop, reliving the cult's final days through a new family scenario. The frozen landscape mirrors the cult compound's isolation, and the children stand in for the younger members she couldn't save.

The film operates as a dual revenge tragedy: the children punish Grace for replacing their mother, while the narrative itself punishes Richard for his cowardly retreat from every difficult situation — his first marriage, his children's grief, his second wife's trauma. His death is the only one the film frames as earned.

A remarried father drags his new wife and two grieving kids to a remote snowbound lodge for Christmas — then leaves them there. The woman, Grace, survived a cult mass suicide as a child. Now she's rattling around a freezing cabin with a hostile teenage stepson quietly masterminding an elaborate revenge scheme, and his younger sister, pulled into carrying it out. When the power dies, the food vanishes, and Grace's pills disappear, the children's quiet campaign of psychological demolition kicks into gear. What looks like haunting is really something uglier and more deliberate.