I’ll admit, that when I first saw the trailers for Lake Mungo, I was really, REALLY excited. And thus, I was intensely gratified to see that the folks out at Lions Gate had sent a copy out as part of the 2010 After Dark Horrorfest.
Lake Mungo features young Alice Palmer, a sixteen year old girl who seemed to be living the standard in sixteen year old lives. In a tragic turn of events, she drowned while swimming near a local dam. The family she left behind buries her and grieves for her…but that’s only where the story begins. The surviving relatives find themselves besieged by paranormal phenomena, and they turn for help to psychic and parapsychologist Ray Kemeney. As it turns out, Alice was leading a secret double life, and it all centers around Lake Mungo.
Lake Mungo is an Australian import, you might be interested to know, and the most interesting part of the whole affair is the HOW of it all. This isn’t a standard horror movie–in fact, it’s utterly unlike anything that’s ever been in the After Dark Horrorfest. It’s shot in kind of a documentary format, with lots of interviews with the family and neighbors, not to mention lots of pictures and video footage.
There’s a story here, and perhaps the best part of it all is that this story has a real ring of authenticity to it. It would be easy, you see, to mistake Lake Mungo for something you might see on, say, the Discovery Channel. This LOOKS, for all intents and purposes, like a REAL DOCUMENTARY.
And this method in turn has its own pluses and minuses—the first quarter of the film, roughly, is pretty slow. It takes Lake Mungo a pretty substantial amount of time to really get wound up, and that doesn’t do it any favors. But by like token, there are more than a few really CREEPY moments in here. And many of them are so SMALL–little things, like an odd detail in a photograph or a brief glimpse of something, half seen, in video footage.
Lake Mungo does an incredible job with foreboding. Seriously, this thing could be stamped “foreboding” up one side and down the other and it wouldn’t be out of place. It’s not really scary. There aren’t many jumps here. But they can really ratchet up the sense of dread going on here. And that too is a function of the film’s design–it’s pretty clear that nothing will happen to the Palmer family because they’re making this documentary totally after the fact. Everything that happens happened already. They certainly can’t have been attacked and killed by ghosts, because they’re giving interviews.
But what you see here has that scariest of qualities–REALISM. This COULD BE. Lake Mungo has the ring of utter, utter, plausibility and there is nothing so scary as what could actually happen to you. And best of all, there’s a whole lot more than a simple ghost story going on here.
The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this creepy, realistic horror flick a nine out of ten for its massive plausibility and its stark simplicity. Lake Mungo is an excellent addition to the After Dark Horrorfest, and I’m frankly glad I saved this one for the second to last.
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