Lake Mungo (2008)

What if Paranormal Activity was good?

I kid, this is so much more more than that. It’s, in its essence, a fictional documentary about the life and untimely death of Alice, the daughter of a family who struggles to cope with her death and begins experiencing, well… paranormal activity.

It’s not a particularly fast-paced movie, but that’s what makes it so chilling. It lets you sit with every revelation, which the movie also takes its time to deliver. I saw some reviews mock it and call it “padded” for having long sequences of zooming into a grainy photo or video but, at least for me, every second added to the tension and curiosity. Still, if you’re prone to getting distracted or impatient, this might not be the movie for you.

Lake Mungo pulls a lot from those ghost investigation videos and blurry photos that made the rounds online back in the day, and it does so really well. What I particularly love about this is that it doesn’t stick to one medium: nowadays it’s more common to see horror that focuses exclusively on analog effects, such as Local 58, or on digital fuckery (I don’t know of any good examples, sorry). This movie, however, uses both really well. There’s grainy pictures, cassette recordings, etc; as well as digital recordings with that similar yet very distinct unclear quality that old and shitty digital cameras had.

There’s also a terrifying aspect to the way in which the walls around Alice’s private life are completely torn apart piece by piece. Of course, that makes sense given that she is… you know, dead. But the way in which they went about it REALLY got to me from both sides:
I saw the family’s point of view, finding this new and completely unknown side to your daughter, your sister, your friend, that she chose to hide from you which you now have to reconcile with the image you had of the beloved family member you were trying to let go of.
However, since this movie continuously deals with ambiguous possible apparitions of Alice, the idea that she might still be there, it also made me consider her point of view. What if I died and suddenly everyone had access to every private text message, every old photo I regret taking, every incomplete retelling of an anecdote, and every piece of information about myself I wouldn’t want known without me there to provide the appropriate context? What if I was still there watching my identity unravel before me and become a bloated and unrecognisable version of myself?

spooky shit…

Anyway, great movie, highly recommend if you like psychological horror.