The Big Picture
- Alicia Silverstone surprises audiences with her haunting performance in the horror film The Lodge, showcasing her range beyond her comedic roles.
- The film explores the psychological effects of grief and mental illness, using Silverstone’s character’s death to establish important thematic connections.
- Silverstone’s brief but impactful appearance adds intensity and sustains tension in the film, making it a standout moment in her career and a potential new direction for her.
Alicia Silverstone is one of the definitive comedic superstars of the 1990s. In everything from Clueless to Blast from the Past, Silverstone’s bubbly, energetic personality added a delightful sense of positivity and warmth. Although Silverstone’s string of hits in that decade provided many nostalgic memories, she, unfortunately, wasn’t in many mainstream projects in the next decade. While her absence was unfortunate, Silverstone’s comeback came in a very surprising project that was completely different from the genre she’s most closely associated with. Silverstone delivered a haunting, and truly unforgettable performance in the devastating 2020 horror film The Lodge; despite only appearing in one scene, Silverstone left the audience with a lump in their throats that lingered throughout the rest of the film’s runtime.
Alicia Silverstone Makes ‘The Lodge’ More Tragic
While The Lodge appears, on the surface, to be a standard take on the “haunted cabin in a storm” style spookfest, it quickly reveals itself to be a much more psychological style of horror film. This is due to its detailed examination of the lasting effects of grief and any resulting mental illness associated with it. The Lodge utilizes its seemingly straightforward premise to isolate its characters, but in order to do so, directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala first needed to provide the necessary context. This is where Silverstone stepped in to add one of the most traumatizing jump scares in recent memory.
The Lodge follows the lonely father Richard Hall (Richard Armitage) as he seeks to introduce his young children, Mia (Lia McHugh) and Aiden (Jaeden Martell), to his new girlfriend Grace Marshall (Riley Keough). Grace is apprehensive about spending time with Mia and Aiden, as she has been through significant trauma due to her involvement in a suicide death cult when she was younger; the children have concerns of their own, as any new “maternal” presence in their lives is something that they’ve learned to look at with skepticism. The film only slowly reveals details of Grace’s past and how aware of it Mia and Aiden are, but it’s more than evident why the children are in such a constant state of fear. Their mother Laura, whom Silverstone plays, took her own life, which we see in the film’s opening.
Alicia Silverstone Plays Against Type in ‘The Lodge’
At first, Silverstone’s appearance is a surprising one; she’s a well-known star associated with humor and warmth, and it’s strange to see her in what obviously isn’t her standard genre. This in of itself is a work of subtle celebrity casting; The Lodge becomes ridden with anxiety immediately when Silverstone appears with a look of fear and paranoia on her face. While this would have been a fairly straightforward way of opening a horror film otherwise, the very fact that it’s Silverstone makes it more shocking; since she’s not immediately effusing one-liners suggests that things aren’t what they seem. Casting an established star and then killing them off immediately is a bold move, but it’s one that The Lodge uses to its advantage. It’s strange to see someone so expressive as Silverstone with no emotions, but overdramatizing such a dark moment would have made it less effective.
Suicide is a very difficult subject to depict on screen; any horror film that attempts to use it for shock value may come off as disrespectful if it is handled inappropriately. Silverstone’s death sequence itself is shot in a timid, almost documentarian way. It’s evident that the sequence isn’t filtered through Richard’s memory, and in a film with constantly changing perspectives, it is important to be impartial when detailing traumatic material. Silverstone brings a sense of realism and detachment that make the moment even more memorable; it’s so startling that it immediately injects a level of intensity into a film that spends the majority of its runtime building tension.
‘The Lodge’ Falls Apart Without Alicia Silverstone
The Lodge works because of its lack of central narrator; it’s never clear to the viewer if it’s Grace, Aiden, Mia, or something lurking in the shadows that they should be aware of. The viewers are only slowly learning about the circumstances related to Grace’s past as the children are, but Aiden and Mia have secrets of their own that aren’t revealed until the third act twist. While this is a clever conceit, the film needed to establish some basic facts, and Laura’s death is among them. Without knowing what happened to Laura, it would have been impossible for the film to thematically connect her underlying mental illness with the symptoms that Grace is suffering from. It’s why Silverstone’s performance, as brief as it seems, is the single most important in the entire film.
As The Lodge continues, Mia and Aiden scour through Grace’s past with a dispassionate lack of empathy. This could have made them less relatable as characters, but Silverstone’s death serves as the reason why they’re so desensitized. Perhaps any horrible actions that they take are some misguided attempt to “save” their father. At the same time, Grace and Laura have very similar backgrounds; as the viewer learns more about Grace, the film suggests that Laura may have dealt with similar issues. It retroactively makes Silverstone’s performance more effective.
Without such a visceral moment, the film would not have been able to sustain its tension; the viewer has likely already seen a lot of films where things go bump in the night, so the first act of the film isn’t all that spooky. However, The Lodge had already established that it was willing to go to extreme places in terms of content; anyone turning up to see Silverstone’s big horror breakthrough might have been scratching their heads when she disappeared so early on!
Although it’s fun to see her pop up in tributes to Clueless, Silverstone is an incredible actress, and horror might just be her niche. She also starred in the recent Shudder original, Pereptrator, It’s often that actors find their comeback roles in the most surprising of places, and it would be interesting to see Silverstone enter a new era in her career.
