Melbourne International Film Festival 2019 Week 2 Report: THE LODGE, ANGEL OF MINE And THE UNKNOWN SAINT

My experiences at the 2019 Melbourne International Film Festival continue – after 2 weeks of film-filled days I’ve seen 28 titles, an array of international productions that include the hottest releases from Cannes (The Unknown Saint, Les Miserables, Young Ahmed), awaited follow-ups from emerging directors (The Art of Self-Defense, The Day Shall Come, The Lodge) and some celebrated documentaries (The Amazing Johnathan Documentary, You Don’t Nomi), which has made this an incredibly fruitful period in catching up with some of the year’s most anticipated releases.

The Lodge (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala)

At its Sundance premiere earlier this year, critics were quick to call Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s The Lodge “this year’s Hereditary“, and on a literal level, it is. Both films start with a forbidding funeral that kicks off further suffering for a fractured family, an ordeal that descends into a nightmare of  sleepwalking, cult worship, model houses, all captured in Peter Medak-esque wide shots and held together by a singular, decaying female figure. Where Ari Aster remixed Ingmar Bergman’s domestic dynamics within the skin of The Changeling, The Lodge finds itself more preoccupied with its contrived plot twists than any form of psychological interrogation, delivering a ponderous affair that remains far too subdued for its own good.

It begins with a promising buildup too; two bereaved children (Jaeden Martell and Lia McHugh) are forced to stay in their father’s isolated winter cabin alongside their new stepmother Grace (Riley Keough) in a thinly veiled bonding exercise after the recent death of their mother. In horror films, crashing at cabins is never a good idea, and when the bickering trio awaken one morning to find themselves seemingly disconnected from the outside world – snowed in, with all their possessions, electricity and forms of outside communication gone – they start to suspect that supernatural forces may be at work.

Grace is no stranger to diabolical mischief, being the sole survivor of a cult massacre when she was the same age as the kids she’s currently caring for. Dependent on pills and wary of crosses, The Lodge slowly lights a fuse as to whether the trapped tenants will perish by their own hands or from the mysterious forces that have kept them confined. Discarding jump scares for a suffocating atmosphere of risible dread, The Lodge simply meanders for way too long, content with touring its frosty interiors – of both the titular cabin and its disturbed occupants – instead of escalating the scenario.

It’s refreshing that each camera move isn’t punctuated with an accompanying jump scare or piercing stinger, but all lit fuses must lead to an intense finale of sorts, and this minimalistic misery porn strides towards an illogical and just plain ineffective conclusion. The trivial amount of surprises are not worth the staggering amount of investment necessary for them to work, and in the wake of the blockbuster success of the Conjuring franchise, having another horror title attempt to startle us with another vaguely-defined Christian cult creates further cause to roll one’s eyes than shiver one’s spine.

Angel of Mine (Kim Farrant)

In a different decade, Angel of Mine could’ve been considered a major deal. Rewinding back to the 90’s, the kitschy account of a mentally unstable single mother who stalks – and eventually destabilises – an affluent nuclear family, could’ve performed with blockbuster numbers. Even the title seems reminiscent of something that would’ve been headlined by Kim Basinger or Demi Moore back in the day, but now, Kim Farrant’s follow-up to the well-received Strangerland just feels irrelevant.

Angel of Mine, an adaptation of the forgotten 2008 French title Mark of an Angel, isn’t so much a drama as it is a patchwork of formulas, borrowing liberally from the psycho-stalker sub-genre of the aforementioned decade, as well as the Australian film industry’s repeated habit of importing Hollywood stars to attract local audiences, a grievance that was first popularised by Jamie Lee Curtis’ casting in Richard Franklin’s 1981 masterpiece RoadGames.

Going through the motions here is Noomi Rapace, playing a single mother still reeling from the tragic death of her baby daughter years ago. The devastation has permeated into every component of her domestic routine, including neglecting her surviving pre-teen son and the erosion of her marriage with frustrated ex-pat Mike (the other international name, Luke Evans). When her son makes friends with a kid whose sister bears a remarkable resemblance to her lost child, Lizzie’s (Rapace) life starts to fall apart. What begins as an innocent beckoning, as Lizzie pathetically tries to spend time with the daughter of Yvonne Strahovski and Richard Roxbourgh, descends into a full-blown obsession, which threatens the sanity – and the very fabric – of both families, each fraught with their own type of tragedy.

Lizzie’s hopeless obsession – whose optics could be misconstrued as semi-paedophilic – recalls the squirming discomforts of Jonathan Glazer’s underrated Birth, but whilst that film’s use of ambiguity fuelled an anxious atmosphere, here, the whole ordeal quickly grows repetitive, further diluting this star-studded Lifetime movie into just disposable DTV-fodder. It’s hard to determine who this actually for; genre-savvy audiences will find it all too robotic and rote, and more casual viewers will find that its same, single note is being hammered for the entirety of its feature-length runtime.

Luke Davies’ screenplay – the man behind Lion and Beautiful Boy – fails to ground this melodrama into anything real, despite the slivers of palpable potential. The treatment of mental health in Australia or the male dominance of female bodies (even the middling Them That Follow attempted to address this), don’t make it easy to forgive the film, for not every piece of pulp needs to be political. This lamentation is more so confronting the untapped possibilities that aren’t realised, because very little actually happens at all – both narratively or thematically – hence the yearning for something either profound or more unapologetically ridiculous.

The Unknown Saint (Alaa Eddine Aljem)

The beginning of Moroccan writer/director Alaa Eddine Aljemis’ debut feature The Unknown Saint is deceitfully simple: After his car breaks down whilst being pursued by the police, a thief (Younes Bouab) buries a bag of stolen cash on the top of a deserted hill, disguising the mound as an unmarked grave. After he’s arrested and imprisoned, he returns after a period of time to find that a religious monument has been built upon his stash – a sacred mausoleum dedicated to the “Unknown Saint”, surrounded by a holy water fountain, a gift store and an entire village that idolises the holy site.

It sounds like the setup for a short film, but Aljemis’s script, born from a 2016 Sundance screenwriting workshop, uses the Thief’s arrival to introduce us to an array of eclectic townsfolk who decorate the newly-found town. Residents include another newcomer, a doctor who grows bored when he realises his office is merely a regular hangout spot for the village’s wives than an actual place of medicine, his flask-wielding elderly assistant, the town’s barber who mirrors as its dentist and the Unknown Saint’s dedicated guardian, who keeps guard alongside his reliable German Shepard.

These amusing subplots are rotated regularly, with the main through-line being the Thief’s repeated attempts at breaking into the gravesite, a comical affair whose continuous failures feels ripped right from a Looney Tunes production – one expects the furrowed burglar to finally mail-in an ACME device to get the job done. In fact, the film’s stone-faced comedic sensibilities is why it works so well, it never questions the absurdity of the situation – its deadpan attitude is highly reminiscent of Roy Andersson’s most sarcastic sketches – whilst managing to exasperate each droll routine to its natural conclusion.

Alongside his writing, Alaa Eddine Aljemis shows an incredible aptness for visual humour, mirroring the minimalistic Moroccan landscapes – adroitly captured by Amine Berrada – within the rudimentary nature of his characters and the small world in which they inhabit. A true gem of the festival so far.

Do any of these upcoming festival films interest you? Let us know in the comments!