Lake Mungo

Mungo Bury

Lake Mungo
Australia 2008
Directed by Joel Anderson
Screen Australia

Lake Mungo is a film I’d not heard of before. But, with a big, severely overpriced limited edition Blu Ray on its way*, I thought I should maybe check it out and see if I should make a purchase. Frankly, after seeing it and having a good time with it, I’m still not sure... it was a pretty good movie but the price tag is advertised as being quite steep for some reason.

The film is one of those ‘not quite so common as found footage’ horror films which uses a documentary format to deliver its spooky package. While there is a little ‘found footage’, it’s mostly about the way the footage is presented, as little nuggets midst a raft of interviews with various characters weave a tale that's built up over the course of the film. So it’s people looking back and giving their views on things which happened but, as is often the way with a real documentary, it reveals things as and when it wants to for dramatic effect, is scored to give a sense of tonal unease in the right places and... yeah... has ‘reconstruction shots’ by the real people (yeah, okay, the actors playing the real people) involved in events.

And it starts off with a credits sequence montaged from old, early 20th Century spiritualist photographs, almost to just let the audience know something supernatural should be happening soon as... it’s a slow burn of a movie, with sound bites from the ‘eye witnesses’ playing in the background and then leading onto the recording of an emergency call as a mother reports her daughter is missing near a lake.

As the story set up plays out from a selection of eyewitness testimonies culled from the mother, father and brother of the missing girl (plus some of their friends and acquaintances), we find that the girl, Alice, has been dragged under the lake somehow. Her distorted body, which has been through a lot as it was dragged downstream, is found the next day and the father makes the best identification he can. However, following her death, her image and figure starts turning up in new photographs and videos taken both around the house and also in the area of Lake Mungo (miles away). Is the spirit of the dead girl haunting the family or is something even more sinister going on?

Well... the film gets really twisty and turny and, as I said, like some real documentaries I’ve seen in the past it plays its cards close to its chest by revealing certain things throughout the course of the film. The photographic and video evidence is thrown hugely into question at one point until, something else is noticed which first takes it into another alleyway and then, some more things start falling into place which lead back to the idea that Alice is very much with the family in spirit form... or is she? And why? As new evidence and puzzle pieces are revealed throughout, we start to build a picture of a simple premise but one which is quite haunting and also totally unexplained, in a way.

There’s also a certain commitment on the part of the cast and crew to try and stick to the ‘really happened’ feel of the piece and consequently there are some really great performances. This kind of film-making tends to elicit very natural turns from the cast and here they are really on board to make this feel as real as they can. There are also a load of non-sequiturs or just odd moments which help lend it a degree of credibility and, I don’t want to put any real spoilers in but things like... a shot of a car driving backwards which you think might just be reversed footage until the voice over narrative by the father explains why he was forced to drive the car in reverse gear. Or the scene where the mother comments, on the day her daughter disappears, that it didn’t feel right driving home with an empty seat in the car. Added to this there are characters like the boyfriend, who seems unreliable somehow... or the next door neighbours, with their stake in Alice (and who drop out of the narrative due to being wanted by police with no evidence of what happened to them). Two separate hypnosis sessions by a local psychic, one involving the mother and one involving the daughter, are also quite helpful in enhancing the riddle which is presented as some kind of final solution to the film (note, there is a post credits sequence but it’s not really essential). Also, little dangling threads like the mother’s midnight excursions into other people’s homes without their knowledge all make for a kind of hidden element to the story, which both clouds the issue and lends an air of unresolved authenticity to the characters but also, I believe, could be seen to suggest that there’s something else going on too... and that not everyone is as innocent as they seem.

The score by David Paterson and the sound design, which sometimes amounts to pretty much the same thing, are both very good and also help spook the viewer as the camera zooms in on distressed, pixilated areas of footage to reveal things you didn’t notice when you were too busy looking at something else. Alas, once again there’s no CD soundtrack (or any kind of score release, actually), so I won’t get a chance to listen to this stuff as a stand alone experience.

Nothing much else to say about this one other than, because of the cobbled together documentary format, it feels a little different to a lot of other horror movies around, which is always a good thing. Lake Mungo is a well crafted movie and certainly worth a watch if horror films are your thing.  

*At time of writing, at least... I think it’s probably in stores by now.**

** Since adding that, it has indeed been released in a terrifyingly over priced edition.***

*** Since adding that, it’s now gone out of print and been rereleased in a standard edition at a more reasonable price (which I might well pick up sometime soon).