Review: Claustrophobic horror tale 'The Lodge' is disturbing in all the worst ways

The cabin-in-the-woods horror movie “The Lodge” is disturbing and unsettling, but in all the wrong ways.

A horror movie, when it’s working well, is actually life-affirming. There’s some menacing thing, whether serial killer or demonic presence, and the people being attacked beat it back through intelligence and sheer will to survive. In “The Lodge,” the directing team of Veronica Franz and Severin Fiala provide the menace, but not the humanity.

(Things get rather spoiler-y from here on out, so consider yourself warned.)

The story — which the directors wrote with Sergio Casci — begins with a separated couple, Richard (Richard Armitage) and Laura (Alicia Silverstone), handing off the kids, Aidan (Jaeden Martell, from “It”) and Mia (Lia McHugh) for a weekend. Laura’s hopes of reconciling are dashed when Richard tells her he wants to expedite the divorce process, so he can marry his girlfriend, Grace (Riley Keough). Laura responds by eating a bullet, the first of several cheap shocks the movie delivers.

Six months later, and Richard suggests he and the children go to their remote mountain house for Christmas, and he’ll bring Grace so the kids can get to know her. There’s a lot to know about Grace, like the fact that she was the case study in one of Dad’s psychology papers, as the lone survivor of a Christian death cult run by Grace’s preacher father.

Richard decides it’s a good idea to leave the kids alone with Grace for a couple of days. Of course, this is the sort of bad idea that only happens to prod along a horror-movie plot. So does the added development of having the cabin’s food supply, along with everyone’s coats and Grace’s meds, mysteriously disappear.

Franz and Fiala explored the dynamic of children in a house with a maternal figure to alarming effect in their 2014 Austrian thriller “Goodnight Mommy.” Repeating the general themes turns out to be less successful — in part because the filmmakers remain so detached from their characters that then never allow us to become attached. And without that connection, even with Keough’s ferocious performance, we never are given the space to care what happens to Grace or the children.

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‘The Lodge’

★★

Opened February 7 in select cities; opens Friday, February 21, at the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City). Rated R for disturbing violence, some bloody images, language and brief nudity. Running time: 108 minutes.