The Irish horror film The Lodgers used the latter translation as the most accurate version of the title. The story from David Turpin, directed by Brian O’Mall, was filmed in 2017 in the most mystical place in Ireland. Not only locals believe that in the vicinity of Loftus Hall Castle in the county of Wexford all kinds of underground chton and underwater evil spirits live.
The events of the film The Lodgers refer to the early 1920s. In a dilapidated Gothic mansion, which belongs to a once rich family, there is darkness and desolation. After the suicide of the owners, their children and the only heirs, the twins Rachel and Edward, stayed here to live. In the town they say that the house is in the power of dark forces. Because of this, teenagers lead a reclusive lifestyle against their will.
Brother and sister never leave the estate, they don’t let anyone in, they always keep each other in sight and go to bed strictly at sunset. These orders were established by evil creatures that live in a basement filled with water. Monsters come out of the nearby lake at night, where the twins’ parents drowned, and have complete power over them: they punish them for disobedience, scare them, promise death for trying to part with each other or leave home. Edward completely resigned himself to fate. To survive, he constantly repeats the rules and makes his sister repeat them. Rachel contemplates how to leave this cursed place. A girl near the water is visited by strange visions, she reads Edgar Poe’s book “The Lake” and intuitively feels the approach of a fatal moment in their lives.
The decision to run is made when, on the eve of her 18th birthday, Rachel goes grocery shopping for her birthday dinner. The store owner, Mrs. Nally, reports that the twins are out of money and hands over a letter from the family lawyer. Sir Birmingham notifies the heirs of financial insolvency and the need to sell the estate for debts. Rachel, discouraged by this news, returns to her brother, takes the silver medallion with photographs of her mother and father to pay for the food. On the way, the young recluse becomes a victim of harassment by the local hooligan Dessie. Mrs. Nally’s son comes to her aid.
Young people get to know each other and tell each other about themselves. Crippled at the front, Sean recently returned home. He knows about the young lady from the estate on the outskirts from her mother, who once worked as a servant there. Rachel told a friend that she does not enter from the house, because she and her brother are serving a sentence for the sins of their kind, which “water is not able to wash away.” Sean is distrustful of the story, says that one should not be afraid of ghosts, but of people who do evil: beaten, raped, robbed. After all, the girl already had a chance to be convinced of the cruelty of the world around her.
Rachel and Sean took a liking to each other and started sneaking out to meet by the lake. Flaming love becomes the cause of further dramatic events. Is Birmingham to sell the estate and get money. Rachel meets him in town, offering his mother’s exquisite pearl necklace in exchange for the mansion. He is unhappy, wants to talk to the twin and invades the house. Edward meets him with a knife in his hands, injures him and throws him alive into a cellar filled with water. Rachel, who comes running to the sound of a splash, almost becomes a victim of her brother, who is trying to rape her. In horror, leaving the house, the girl sees that the necklace dropped by Birmingham is not pearl, but bone.
Mysticism has intensified and has become so threatening that Rachel and Sean, who are in love, intend to leave these places by all means. The girl goes to the grave of her parents to say goodbye to them forever and leave the notorious medallion on the tombstone. The guy, determined to deal with this mysticism and punish the offender of his beloved, goes to the mansion. Sean dodges an attack from Rachel’s half-crazed brother.
Edward himself, during the fight, runs into his knife and, bleeding, dies. Rushing to the rescue of his beloved, who fell into the dark depths of an ominous cellar with water, Sean dives after her. It is difficult for a cripple to swim without a leg, and the drowned ancestors of the twins drag him to the bottom. Rachel loses consciousness, and then miraculously emerges in the lake, near which she spent many hours unraveling the mysteries of the curse of their family.
At the end of the film The Lodgers it turns out that the basement with water is a “mirror” reflection of the estate itself. Here lived a family that practiced incestuous unions for almost two centuries. This is a sin that “water cannot wash away” – that’s what the girl said to Sean. Incest among the twins often born in the dynasty was the reason that punishment appeared from the depths of the lake.
With her disobedience to established rules, her unwillingness to follow the will of her elders, Rachel breaks the ancient curse of the family and gains freedom. But at what cost! The loss of the only relative in the whole wide world and the loss of her lover, who became the most dear person to her heart. Rachel leaves the house forever in an unknown direction. The semantic load of the film The Lodgers is a belief in the love of freedom of high feelings that give a person courage, courage, determination to decide his own destiny.
