“I have a nasty feeling that things will go wrong for me. I feel as though something negative has occurred to me. Although it hasn’t yet arrived at me, it is moving toward me.
The movie Lake Mungo is about fear. The overarching idea of dread, that lingering sensation of unavoidable but unknowable catastrophe that hangs over our heads, is tied to the 2008 Australian horror movie. Digital Lake Mungo is terrifying. I schedule my rewatches of this film the same way I schedule dental cleanings. The experience isn’t very nice, but it’s necessary to occasionally have your ass completely given to you by a horror film. Writer/director Joel Anderson’s lone feature film to date, Lake Mungo, is a ghost story built on sadness that everyone who has ever lost someone or briefly lost oneself would be able to identify with. Every individual with a pulse should watch it at least once, and then, they should immediately dial their loved ones. It’s sad and horrifying.
In Anderson’s opinion, Lake Mungo is more of a film about mourning than it is a supernatural film. “I believe the purpose is to explore grief. In order to examine many personalities and their reactions to a crisis, that is why we shot it as a documentary, he stated in an interview with After Dark Films. “The one thing I believe everyone dread the most is the thought of someone they love or a family member passing away in a tragic situation. It’s an extremely real, very human fear. A horrific accident, you know, just doesn’t make sense. As a result, it begs the questions of whether there is a pattern or rationale to how things operate. Or is it just absurd? So, in my opinion, you must deal with some very significant problems. Additionally, you don’t do it logically. I believe you accomplish it by grieving.
This moment works so well because it is so terrifying in the first of two ways. It’s just a fantastic surface-level execution of holding the audience’s attention on a single subject before suddenly slamming you in the face with an illogical visual. Although the term “jump scare” has come to be derided over time, this one is effective. I would never go to the Jump Scare Hall of Fame, but this was a first-day contender. The most common criticism I hear of Lake Mungo is that there is just one frightening sequence, but that is only because the film’s first 85 to 90 minutes basically wrap you up into a ball. If the climax of a horror film is tension followed by release, Lake Mungo’s is tension followed by complete devastation.
Unfortunately, responses like that can provide false solace. The Palmers continue on, if not content, then at least at ease with the realisation that they failed to comprehend their daughter. We discover how accurate they are in perhaps the cruellest knife-turn in the entire film. As the credits begin to roll, we watch earlier scenes from the movie—scenes that, at the time, were deemed to be a hoax or a hopeful error, serving as evidence that Alice’s ghost wasn’t real. But Lake Mungo is a case study in deception. We can see that Alice was present the entire time—in tight spaces, across short distances, and at impossible angles. We also missed her.