plug: Lake Mungo (2008) is a ghostly found-footage excavation of grief
"I feel like something bad has happened. It hasn't reached me yet but it's on its way."
Welcome to today’s plug, a quick recommendation of an oft-forgotten film, cult classic, or movie that is dying to be rewatched //
Lake Mungo is a Australian found-footage horror film about the fine line between dread and grief that rests, diabolically, on either side of a family or community tragedy.
Framed around a series of interviews with the surviving family and friends of 16-year-old Alice Palmer, the film takes place in the aftermath of Alice’s drowning at a dam in Ararat, Australia. Alice’s surviving brother Mathew sets up video cameras the family home and captures apparent images of Alice’s ghost. The plot, naturally, thickens from there, and the family uncovers secrets of Alice’s life that they suspect their departed daughter wanted them to know about from beyond the grave. Some images of Alice’s ghost are revealed to be inauthentic, while other, seemingly authentic ones materialize later.
More of a low-key mockumentary than an all-out found-footage joint, Lake Mungo leans in on a very real, downbeat sense of the nagging telekinetic trauma that can surround an unsolved disappearance, or even the sudden, tragic death of a loved one. The succession of spooky digital imagery and evolving story of a family looking for answers culminates in an apt translation of an inescapable aspect of living through tragedy—the pain of unanswerable questions and the terrible phantom guilt of thinking you could’ve done more, had you only known.
Much of low-budget, B to Z-grade found-footage horror requires one to look past amateurish performances to enjoy the genre’s singular virtues. Lake Mungo is unique in that almost every performance feels authentic. Director Joel Anderson does a great job melding low-to-standard-def digital with faux-interview footage to create a creepy atmosphere—telling a moody, modern ghost story without a single overt “scare.” In doing so out of such exceptionally stripped-down filmmaking parts, Lake Mungo achieves a palpable sense of communal dread, grief, and empathy all its own.
You can stream Lake Mungo on Amazon Prime.
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