Lake Mungo (2008)
Lake Mungo
By Calum Whitfield
- 4.5/5 Cameras 🎥🎥🎥🎥.5
- Written/directed by Joel Anderson
- Starring: Rosie Traynor, David Pledger, Martin Sharpe, et al.
- Where to find it: Shudder
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| No Copyright Infringement Intended |
Australian film isn’t a scene people probably think about too much, but they make some really good horror movies. Lake Mungo is a tiny budget ghost story that made almost no impact when it came out but over the years has picked up a bit of a cult following: is this deserved?
The film follows the family and friends of Alice Palmer, a 16-year-old girl who drowns while out near a dam with her parents and brother. Following her sudden death, strange occurrences start happening and her family begins to question whether she’s really gone. It plays out as a classic talking-heads-style documentary similar to all the true crime documentaries you can see on Netflix today with the participants talking retrospectively about the events taking place, cutting away regularly to various photographs and home videos. This gives the film a very believable, realistic feel helped by the fact that very little of the dialogue is scripted, allowing the various interviews to come across as more organic. This of course is only possible thanks to excellent work from a fairly large cast of mostly unknown actors, each of whom manages to feel very natural in their roles within the film. Honestly, if I didn’t know going in, I could easily have been convinced that this was a real documentary.
The film’s narrative is hard to discuss in much detail as it twists and turns regularly throughout making it hard to say much without giving something important away. So instead, I’d like to focus more on the film’s tone and themes. Lake Mungo is a very scary movie that gets into your head and leaves you questioning if you’re missing something in almost every image that comes up on screen, slowly building a sense of fear and dread as it builds towards its climax. But beyond the scares, Lake Mungo is an incredibly sad story that examines the grief of a family that’s just lost their daughter, and it works so well in this regard. At the risk of potentially giving away too much (skip to the end of the paragraph if you want to avoid any risk of spoilers) throughout the film more and more of Alice’s past is uncovered with it becoming clearer and clearer that she was hiding a lot from her family and implying that maybe her death wasn’t as accidental as first thought. The guilt that these feelings cause in her family really call into question almost everything you see on screen, with it becoming incredibly difficult to tell how much of the more supernatural side to the film is really happening and how much is just the family trying to process a tragedy none of them saw coming. This also adds to the real-world feel of the film; in the end, the scariest idea the film pulls forward is how little you might know of what’s going on beneath the surface even of those closest to you.
Before I conclude I do think it’s worth mentioning some criticisms I have of the film. For one thing, films throws a lot of plot twists at you, and while many hit home effectively, some don’t really seem to come too much. Either the film needed an extra fifteen minutes or so, which I’d argue would reduce its effectiveness, or one or two of these ideas needed to go to allow the rest their deserved focus.
As the credits played out, I sat quietly sobbing to myself trying to get a grasp on what I thought of the film. I couldn’t. Days later I had finally formed an opinion; Lake Mungo is a brilliant film that goes far beyond superficial scares to create a tragic tale of a family’s grief. I can’t recommend it enough to those looking for a classic ghost story that takes the clichés and elevates them into something that feels rather unique, though be warned that watching this film for me was the emotional equivalent to going three rounds with Anthony Joshua.
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