Lake Mungo (2008) Review

 

Summary (No Spoilers):

Lake Mungo is a horror movie presented as a documentary discussing the mysterious death of a teenage girl named Alice Palmer. It shows the strange events surrounding the family in the aftermath of her death.

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In-Depth Review (Spoilers Ahead!):

The documentary begins with the mysterious drowning of Alice Palmer. Her body is recovered from the lake, and it looks super disgusting with a notably closed eye and grime all over her body. It's a pretty effective makeup job.

The documentary soon follows after the three family members left behind (the dad Russell, the mom June, and the brother Mathew), who all cope (or don't cope) in different ways. Russell seems to be doing alright in dealing with it by working a lot, largely in part because he identified Alice's body and has some sense of closure, but June did not, and she seems to be having terrible nightmares and ends up wandering into the houses of her neighbors late at night. Mathew, meanwhile, has become fixated on an interest in photography.

What this movie does really well so far is making the acting seem very real, like there's no overdramatic acting but instead very serious, very real depictions of grief in the expressions and behaviors of all of the family members throughout this part of the movie.

Mathew's photography habit picks up on some strange shots, some of which seem to include what looks to be Alice in them. This inspires Russell and June to exhume Alice's body to double-check it was actually her, but it quickly turns out that was a dead end, as it is definitely Alice.

June consults a radio host psychic in the meantime, a man who goes by the name Ray Kemeny, and a seance is held, though it doesn't seem to hold merit until the video is later reviewed, showing Alice on video. 

Soon after, Mathew admits he faked the photos by pretending to be Alice or using TV footage so they could exhume the body and give June closure, though June seems skeptical this is true, which is around the point when the textbook simple haunting aspects seem to twist and the narrative changes down a different path.

In one of the videos of Mathew pretending to be Alice, there is a strange figure of a man in the corner of Alice's bedroom, and he's squatted looking for something, which reveals to June a video tape of Alice having sexual relations with the neighbors (a husband and wife), a situation that clearly traumatized Alice after, but left her unwilling to talk to her parents as she no longer felt like she could.

And soon after this happens, Ray reveals he had met Alice once before, as she came to Ray to ask for the same consultation June did after Alice's death. It's clear she was struggling with the trauma from what happened with the neighbors.

The interviews are spliced together, and the weirdest thing is June and Alice seem to have matching consultations, like they are visiting each other at different points in time, which raises a lot of questions about the time continuum and whether Alice and June really were just missing each other in a place in-between reality and dreams.

Alice's boyfriend Jason soon after reveals there was mobile phone footage capturing Alice, and after reviewing the footage a lot, June realizes Alice seemed to be beneath a tree burying something. And upon visiting Lake Mungo, they find a box full of precious items like her new phone.

The phone contains some really strange footage of Alice where she sees another version of herself coming out of the darkness, like a white blur until her face can be seen with one of her eyes forced shut, the same as her corpse discovered in the lake. The mirror Alice runs at the camera full speed.

In the aftermath of this reveal, the Palmer family feels like they learned all of Alice's secrets, so Alice is no longer in the house and she has been at peace. They decide to move away and leave the house behind.

It's never really explained by the movie why any of this happened or why the family isn't bothered or scared by it. It's a really strange part of the movie that still doesn't compute in my brain, and the only answer I can come up with is that the family is looking for peace in all the wrong places and ignoring the strange and scary reality of Alice's life leading up to her death.

That strange and scary reality is shown to the viewer when shots of all the videos and photos show Alice sitting or standing in the background of all the shots, including Alice standing in the window watching her family preparing to leave her behind. There will never be peace for Alice, who became invisible and ignored by those who she loved most, making Alice's worst fears come true. She will never have peace.

This was a very sad and interesting movie to watch, especially with the ending having so many possible explanations from the mundane to the strange. The most likely interpretation is one of grief and fear embodied in the character of Alice Palmer, but a fun one could include the idea of Alice being trapped between time, this one supplemented by little details involving the mom's psychic consultation, the phone footage showing another version of Alice, and the way she becomes invisible to her family even while she's right there.

This movie does have a slow start, but it has solid acting throughout and held my attention the whole time, and the unclear ending allowed me to think a lot about possible ending interpretations, so I give this a 5/5.