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Lake-Mungo-Poster

Director: Joel Anderson
Year: 2008
Country: Australia

After Dark’s “8 Films to Die For” program is has been up to this point in time a horrible misnomer. Save for Frontière(s), which was never released in theaters with the other films, and Zombies of Mass Destruction, which was pretty terrible but awfully funny, the films that consider themselves lucky enough to be included under the After Dark moniker are fairly awful or forgettable. I was thus surprised when I heard Lake Mungo, one of the films slated for the 2010 line-up, was actually really good. Several reviews have been positive, with a couple of horror bloggers declaring it an excellent film. Given its cinema verite approach, I was intrigued to see if it could live up to the hype. I was weary, given the tendency for hype to spoil many films for me (Grace, anyone?), but in the case of this Australian pseudo-doc, expectations were exceeded, with writer/director Joel Anderson delivering on Hell of an effective horror film.

Presented as a documentary, the film explores the disappearance and death of 16-year old Alice Palmer, who disappeared while swimming in a local dam with her family. Shortly after her body is recovered from the dam, a series of bizarre events typical of a haunting are experienced by the Palmer family. Noises, shadows, and the like, primarily centered in or around Alice’s bedroom, make the grieving process all the more difficult. Eventually, her brother, who possesses a keen interest in photography, reveals photographs that seem to contain the ghost of Alice. As time passes, the family consults a parapsychologist, learns of Alice’s secret double life, and discovers the importance of the dry Lake Mungo.

The primary focus of the film is not on the ghostly presence of Alice, but her family’s reactions to her disappearance, death and subsequent information concerning her life. The “haunting” aspect is downplayed, with Anderson preferring to allude to it instead of show it outright. The result is a slow burn, with the family’s shock of learning each new bit of information complementing the viewer’s. The film’s primary attempt at frightening the viewer is subtle, employing a brief shot of a photograph or video footage showing what appears to be a ghost or otherwise disturbing anomaly and zooming in to bring it to detail. This gives the viewer the opportunity to inspect it, much like the family would, and realize the definable features of what is presumed to be Alice. Video footage is presented in much the same way, save for a climactic scene at the end of the film that is ambiguous yet decidedly haunting.

The big “twist” comes about two-thirds of the way through the film, and serves as an attempt to explain Alice’s increasing distance from her mother as the months leading up to her disappearance progress. At first I felt it was incidental to the bigger picture, but recent reflections on its overall purpose has made me reconsider. Sparing you any chance of learning the twist before viewing the film, it comes as a major shock to the both the family and the viewer, which is yet another example of how Anderson manages to parlay the film’s realism onto the audience. The result is a greater understanding of the nature of Alice’s disappearance, which culminates in a trip to the titular lake and a terrifying discovery.

Lake Mungo is a terrifyingly real representation of the mechanics of love, loss and grief, all while convincingly including a healthy dose of the supernatural. Bolstered by a superb story, solid acting, and a haunting score, Lake Mungo can be seen as After Dark’s savior, the single film that proves a hitherto horrible film series can have at least one respectable film among the rejects.