The Lodge is an interesting experiment between silence and music. It builds fear and tension through a sparing use of Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans’ chaotic and discordant score.
The vast majority of The Lodge is entirely without music. The score often unexpectedly bursts into the film after minutes of quiet – guttural strings, frantic drumming, wailing and piercing discord – then abruptly stops mere seconds later. These crescendos are so intense and unsettling that they make painful and paranoid even seemingly banal sequences; packing a bag or riding in a car immediately feel like activities on the precipice of death.
At other times the score lingers, a single note hangs in the air followed by the occasional hum or soft metallic-like clang. These atmospheric moments often mix with natural, diegetic noises – howling wind, cracking ice, banging wood – to create a slowly rumbling soundscape. Sometimes it explodes into brief violent crescendos, other times it fades away, engulfed by natural sounds or the void of silence. This uncertainty further adds to the psychological unease so heavily laden throughout the film.
While the instrumentation of Bensi and Jurriaans’ score is surprisingly varied, the music itself is not. But because The Lodge uses music so sparingly, this repetition has little, if any, drawback in the film. Instead it goes relatively unnoticed, only becoming apparent in the standalone release, an album of nearly 40 minutes of discomfort and despair.
