Opening Scenes Preview:
THE LODGERS begins looking out upon a dark and beautiful-but-creepy pond. On the shore we see a splash of white. It's a girl, lovely in sleep, dressed in early 1900s clothing; she has dozed off while reading a book. She awakens, looks about, and, realizing where and when she is, leaps up with a start and, completely forgetting her book, begins running. She is late for something.
She knows her way. She pounds through the black forest as quickly and surefootedly as a deer, the darkness and flowing gown notwithstanding, leaping effortlessly over obstacles. Something of the unearthly is about this place; as she departs we see ripples on the surface of the pond... moving in a manner that cannot be.
Even running through a small cemetery does not give her pause. As she runs, a powerful wind begins to blow. Something is aware of her tardiness and isn't happy. And still she runs grimly on, dust and leaves swirling in the gale about her, and arrives at a large house, dark save for one dim light leaking from a single window. Even before she reaches the front steps she can hear a grandfather clock chiming the late hour. She bursts through the door, pauses for but a moment to confirm the time on the clock, and races up the grand staircase and to the door of her room. But before she can enter, another, nearby door opens, and a pajama clad boy calls out to her.
"Rachel! It's midnight! They're coming!", is all he says before retreating into his room, slamming the door.
Breathlessly, "Edward...!", is all Rachel can say, and quickly retreats into her own room, slamming her own door.
In a floating, descending shot, we return to the base of the grand staircase to see, ominously, a small trapdoor, perhaps just large enough for an average size person to fit through. At one end is a loop of metal with which to grasp it, and the door would apparently lift off entirely as there is no hinge at the opposite end. As the chiming ends, water begins to flow upward around the trapdoor, flowing faster as we watch.
And then we learn the rules that govern the lives of these fraternal twins in the words of a haunting little song:
Girl Child, Boy Child, Listen Well
Be in Bed by Midnight's Bell
Never Let a Stranger Through Your Door
Never Leave Each Other All Alone
Good Sister, Good Brother Be
Follow Well These Cautions Three
Long As Your Blood Be Ours Alone
We'll See You Ever from Below
The next morning, Rachel descends the stairs to join her brother at breakfast. Edward sits, awaiting her, at a breakfast table thick with dust and so dark that many details are lost. Only vague illumination comes through the curtained windows that throw feeble rays upon the table centerpiece of dead flowers and desiccated branches. It is a house of corruption and decay, inside and out, a reflection of their lives.
Rachel wishes her brother a happy birthday, and wonders if he will do the same for her. After all, they are twins; it is a birthday for them both. But Edward is having none of it. As gaunt and unpleasant as Rachel is lovely, he is concerned only with her failure to adhere to the few rules they must. Even though she has not technically broken the rules, she has come so close, Edward is certain she has stirred the ire of whatever it is that enforces those rules. Rachel pleads with Edward. It is their 18th birthday, they are at their majority. They have planned a celebration for the day. Furious, Edward drags Rachel to the trapdoor and forces her to sing a little song of rules. In tears, she complies, and if whatever the authority is that rules their lives was angry, Rachel must've succeeded in placating it. We hear haunting notes of the tune echoed by unseen voices.
Review:
THE LODGERS is as stylish and haunting as a ghost movie should be. Ghosts are always the result of equal parts sadness and horror, human failure and depravity. THE LODGERS has all the human moral putrefaction you could want and in surfeit. How ghosts could NOT result from what's been going on in this family for generations is the real question. The visuals, the acting, the technical qualities of filmography and context and etc. are all but flawless.
Regrettably, writing a coherent and cohesive, or even self-consistent story involving the supernatural is an exceedingly tall order. Most genres of stories assume the same structural scaffolding of reality for both the writer and the reader, and this is an enormous convenience to the writer because they can get on with their story. Tales of the supernatural involve the use of alternate realities the rules of which have to be explained to the reader. This often results in movies that are a hopeless mess and rely heavily on their scary images and effects to keep you from looking too closely at the story. Unfortunately, THE LODGERS sports these warts in abundance.
Why is it called THE LODGERS? I was ever able to figure that out. A lodger is someone who "rents a furnished room". To the best of my knowledge, there are absolutely no lodgers, nor anything to do with lodgers, in the entire movie. If you had simply called it "Fritter My Wig" it would've made as much sense.
One of the rules to raise the ire of the powers that be is to "never let a stranger through your door". Edward's terror with respect to the butt-in-ski Birmingham, and ultimately Edward feeling that he had to kill Birmingham, was the fact that Birmingham's presence was going to force a violation of the stranger through the door rule. And yet in other parts of the movie there are references to townspeople having been employed at the Manor in prior years. So what makes a stranger a sufficient stranger to trigger a rule violation? Birmingham's family had a working relationship with the twin's family for generations; why would Birmingham trigger the stranger rule and not townspeople coming in as employees?
Rachel was more than happy to violate the leave each other all alone rule. Her only hesitation seemed to be the "Where shall I go? What shall I do?" (with apologies to Vivian Leigh) conundrum. As long as she had Sean in hand, she was more than happy to leave, Edward be damned.
As Rachel demonstrated, she was perfectly capable of going away from the estate as far as she wanted to go, as into town. If she had simply stayed in town or gone further afield, what could have happened to her? As far as we could tell, the only thing keeping Edward in place was his own agoraphobia.
Edward's fear of violating the rules was illogical. It's exceedingly obvious that the twins are in a no-win situation. It's very clear that, as a member of this family, you either get killed breaking the rules, or if you manage to avoid breaking the rules you end up committing suicide with a watery theme. Quod erat demonstrandum. Dead one way or dead the other. In fact, getting yourself killed might be a GOOD thing from the standpoint of stopping the cycle of the curse. And incidentally, the origin of the curse is never given. They do mention that they brought the curse with them to this house, which would certainly have meant not being in their own beds by midnight with respect to the place that they had come FROM.
As I like to say, a fun ride isn't about analytics. It's about turning off your brain and enjoying the ride. Do that with THE LODGERS and you'll be fine. Engage your prefrontal cortex and you're lost.
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