The Lodgers is a 2017 Irish film directed by Brian O'Malley, stars Charlotte Vega, Bill Milner and Eugene Simon, and was filmed almost entirely at the infamous Loftus Hall in County Wexford, a real-life source of many urban legends and the location of much legend-tripping.
I first heard stories about Loftus Hall while I was was in college. Many of my colleagues from the southeast side of the country knew of this place. Today it has been reinvented as a tourist attraction (dark tourism, I guess) but back then it was dilapidated, rotting, and hella spooky. Pretty much everyone who spoke to me of the place had visited with their friends upon a dark night on a 'dare.' There are myriad local legends about the place, some of them unique to Loftus Hall, others seeming to be the kind of generic myths that get attached to any spooky old building. In particular, it was most often said that a gentleman visiting the Hall centuries ago was revealed to have been the Devil himself (he revealed a cloven hoof when a lady bent over to pick up a dropped playing card), upon which he disappeared through the roof in a pillar of fire. The patch where he burst through the roof was said to be still visible. Suffice it to say that Loftus Hall is a unique location in which to set a period ghost story movie, and I heartily approve.
As to the plot: a pair of young-looking twins live together in a decrepit, decaying house somewhere in rural Ireland. They have upper-class, British-inflected accents, and it is clear that they are the remnants of a once powerful and influential line that has fallen upon hard times. In some mystical way, they are tied to the house, cannot leave the immediate area, and must live according to a series of arcane rules, lest some unstated but horrible force that seems to have power over them become angry. Their interactions with the local villagers, as well as their English lawyer, lead to them breaking the rules, and having to deal with the consequences.
At first, I wasn't sure exactly when or where this story was happening. The house itself seems stuck in a timewarp, with gaslamps and candles being used instead of electrical lighting, and by loading on the gothic tropes, the film seems to be setting itself up as a classic Victorian-era ghost story. Similarities to The Woman In Black are unavoidable. The film looks amazing, it's decadent and sumptuous, in an almost over-the-top manner (almost Guillermo del Toro levels of gothic unreality). The lead actors' British accents almost lead me to presume that this film was yet another example of an Irish storyteller setting their ghost story in England to account for prevailing tastes of audiences (a la Sheridan leFanu and Bram Stoker). But once it became clear that the film is happening in Ireland sometime after the end of the First World War, and that the twins therefore sound British because they are representatives of the old Anglo-Irish ascendency, I realised that the setup was being used to make a far more unique, and a far more Irish, point.
How interesting to see the plight of the Anglo-Irish represented in fantastic fiction, and using the traditional British haunted house setting to do so too. There's nary a town in Ireland that doesn't have a 'big house' (apart from the ones that burnt their Big Houses down after independence, of course), the place where the land-owning gentry lived with their servants in a kind of Upstairs Downstairs scenario, acting out a bizarre facsimile of their British counterparts, though never being truly considered as the same breed. (For a great take on this under-represented topic, check out this episode of The Irish Passport Podcast). In The Lodgers, what else do our spectral, inheritance-cursed due represent but the liminal Anglo-Irish, neither fish nor foul, not of this world nor the next, wedded to ancient, once-great lineages and beholden to restrictive, arcane rules and laws? It's no accident that the story is set about 1920 or so - Irish independence is just around the corner, and the lifestyle that these two represent, already in terminal decline, is about to end forever. 'How can fate be wrong?' wonders one character, referring both to the inevitability of their ghastly family inheritance (a classic Victorian ghost story trope, with hints of Lovecraft too) as well as the distinctly 20th-century rise of nationalism that's on the horizon.
'I have come all the way from the mainland,' says the family's lawyer, the aptly-named Mr Birmingham, referring to England, presuming this to be the pair's spiritual home. 'This is our mainland,' replies the girl, showing that they are at least as separated from their cultural cousins across the sea as they are from the local, Gaelic Irish who resent their presence and curse the locals who return from the trenches, having served the British Empire. The lawyer even mentions that though his family has attended to the financial affairs of their own for generations, none of his own forebears have ever troubled to actually visit the property: they are paternalistic, absentee landlords, dealing with their half-forgotten ward in the manner that England dealt with Ireland.
None of this is made too overt, and viewers unfamiliar with the reality of these two different classes of people living in Ireland will likely miss the subtext of the film, diluting its effectiveness.
Regardless of how you feel about the politics on show here, The Lodgers tackles a difficult, and uniquely Irish, subject head-on here, using the vestements of the classic gothics. It's a film that could only have been made in, and about, Ireland.
The Lodgers is available on Netflix as of the time of writing.
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