Lake Mungo | Mystery/Horror | rated R (A,L,N,S) | Australian | 1:29 mins
After their daughter, Alice, drowns in a tragic lake accident the Palmer family starts to believe that her ghost is still lurking in their home. Hiring a psychic reader and positioning cameras around the house they attempt to catch her presense on film, an act that gets the attention of the local media and sparks a debate about the belief in ghosts. But what the cameras catch is not quite what they expected prompting an investigation into the life their daughter kept secret from them in her final years.
An Afterdark Horrorfest movie lassoed in from Australia, Lake Mungo tells it’s tale of grief and ghosts like a Dateline news magazine story. It does so very well. Mechanically the movie is a spot-on recreation of a creepy documentary stitching together the story with still photos, stock footage and voice overs. In this age where every other movie wants to dupe you into thinking it’s found some lost footage of a true story, Mungo actually does a good job of making that illusion convincing. There aren’t obvious cheats here.
Mungo really only has one trick that it goes back to again and again: zooming in on taken photos to find Alice’s ghostly image in the background. A pixilated, supernatural Where’s Waldo. It is effective up to a point and then the movie finds different ways of making it work. It discredits itself and makes us question what we believe to be going on. But supernaturally very little happens in the movie. It becomes more of a mystery in which this girl’s private life is combed through and deconstructed in death for the sake of trying to find out if anything other than the obvious happened to her. Do these parents not want to accept the mundane reality or is there really something other worldy going on here?
Lake Mungo wraps us in a hypnotic atmosphere with it’s underplayed music and the authenticity of the visuals. It sustains a slow burn of creepiness throughout, as if at any moment something might happen. It’s one of those movies that all builds up to one good revelatory scare. Unfortunately, in this case once we get to the titular lake the payoff works, but just works. Not quite worth the build up. It’s well made, but lacks ambition and is light on scares. It does what it does well, but the story here is paper thin and the movie is kind of all over the place, throwing us twists and turns to keep it filling out an already short running time. Enjoyable.