The Lodge: The Disturbing Truth About Aiden And The Dollhouse

The Lodge carefully leaves audiences with a clue about a dollhouse; this offers a hint to the disturbing truth about Aiden from the very beginning of the movie.

The Lodge is about Aiden (Jaeden Martell) and his younger sister, Mia (Lia McHugh), who are convinced that their father’s new girlfriend, Grace (Riley Keough), is responsible for their mother committing suicide. They end up going to a remote cabin for the holidays with their dad, Richard, and Grace. Soon after, their dad has to go away for a couple of days on business, and Grace is left with Aiden and Mia in the secluded cabin. From there, things take a dark turn pretty quickly as it turns out that Aiden and Mia have been playing an elaborate trick on Grace, convincing her that they’ve all died from gas inhalation, and are now trapped in purgatory.

The problem is, Grace’s father was the leader of a religious cult that committed mass suicide. She’s the only survivor of the event, and witnessed the whole thing. This experience has left her psychologically on-edge, which is shown by the pills she takes to remain level-headed. As Aiden systematically takes away Grace’s doubts that they are in purgatory at the cabin, she begins to unravel, leading up to The Lodge’s ultra-dark ending. Interestingly, although the audience does not discover Aiden’s trick until late in the movie, there are a lot of clues throughout that show what he is doing. One of the most important clues is the dollhouse that Aiden used as a staging area for his elaborate plans.

The Disturbing Truth About Aiden And How He Used The Dollhouse

Aiden is clearly a sociopath. The level of commitment and planning he needed in order to gaslight Grace so thoroughly is astounding. He not only did he remove all of their food and belongs and hide them in a secret compartment in the basement, but he also made hundreds of snow angels, made up obituaries that he had printed as a prop, and put sleeping medicine in Grace’s hot chocolate. Even after the dog dies, he continues to put the pressure on Grace. He doesn’t appear to feel anything for Grace or even the dog. Also, when he’s at his mother’s funeral, he doesn’t cry.

However, what’s more disturbing is that Aiden used his sister’s dollhouse to stage every move he was going to make. Throughout The Lodge, many of the most crucial scenes are shown staged inside of Mia’s dollhouse, including the night when they all “die” and Aiden’s hanging. The fact that the dollhouse is at home means that Aiden made these plans long before everyone went on the trip to the lodge. In fact, the first time the diorama of Grace, Aiden, and Mia asleep in the living room of the lodge is shown is before their mother’s funeral, which is a full six months prior to when the actual event takes place. It’s clear Aiden has been planning his trick for a long time, almost immediately after his mother’s death.

Aiden and Mia love to play pretend and they’re good at it. They’re also master manipulators. After Aiden convinced Mia to go along with his plans, he recorded old sermons of Grace’s father from the internet, and even did research to pull off his fake hanging. The Lodge is full of twists, but using Mia’s dollhouse was a clever trick for the audience as well; it offered hints for sharp-eyed viewers as to how Aiden planned every meticulous detail. The only thing he didn’t count on was how Grace would respond.

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