‘The Lodger’ Review — The Ghost and Ms. Bisset [CFF `21]

A review of the new film, at the Chattanooga Film Festival now

One of my favorite overlooked horror subgenres is the psycho-biddy movie, or “Grand Dame Guignol”. These movies feature older actresses hamming it up in roles that both make a spectacle of aging and sometimes, at their best, find some subversive empowerment in it, too. Examples include Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? all the way up through 2019’s Greta, which features Isabelle Huppert preying on Chloe Grace Moretz.

The Lodger (Messe Basse), a new French film from first-time director Baptiste Drapeau, has some delicious elements of Grand Dame Guignol. But it’s more than that; it’s something weirder, something a little sweeter than most films of the subgenre. It’s part psycho-biddy in the Greta vein, but also part odd-couple supernatural romance along the lines of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. I loved every strange minute of it.

The story revolves around a young nursing student named Julie (Alice Isaaz), moving to a bigger town for university. She rents a room from the eccentric Elizabeth (Jacqueline Bisset), happy to have somewhere quiet to stay so she can focus on her studies. However, Julie quickly realizes something is amiss: even though Elizabeth frequently refers to her husband Victor in the…