Lake Mungo review (DVD) ★★★★

In 2005 16-year-old Alice Palmer goes missing during a family outing at a lake in Victoria, Australia. Police send her distraught family home to await the results of a search by divers. Her body is discovered several days later. Soon after the family begins to experience mysterious phenomena in their home, and come to believe that Alice is trying to make contact with them.

Filmed and presented as a faux-documentary, Lake Mungo sounds in synopsis like a rip off of the previous year’s Paranormal Activity. In fact in style, tone and effect Joel Anderson’s film is quite different from Oren Peli’s 2007 hit and many of the mock documentary films to have appeared in the wake of Blair Witch Project. Most of these films present themselves as constructions made from found footage with no sign of the filmmaker who has taken this material and edited it into a finished film. Although Lake Mungo contains photographs, video camera and phone camera footage supposedly shot by characters in the story this is presented in a documentary framework. The principle characters are interviewed on camera, we can hear the voice of a director asking questions. This is intermingled with footage of the locations presumably shot by the documentary crew. To all intents and purposes it looks like a professional documentary.

Other mock documentary horror films avoid this approach for the obvious reason that it reduces tension, if a character is interviewed on screen they then cannot die in the course of the narrative, if a character is only talked about then there’s every chance they will die. This was a problem that the recent British thriller Blooded failed to surmount. However it’s not a problem here, because Lake Mungo is a mystery and it’s principal subject is the dead girl Alice. Why did she die, and is she the source of the disturbances in the Palmer household?  This is just the starting point of the story, as the film progresses the mystery of the girl’s death and the nature of subsequent events grow ever darker. What initially looks like a straightforward haunted house story becomes something quite different.

Although unlike his films in form and style, Anderson’s film reminded me most of David Lynch - is it a coincidence that the surname of the family in Lake Mungo is Palmer? There is something of Twin Peaks:  Fire Walk With Me in the way each twist in the tale reveals an ever deepening chasm of darkness beneath the apparently tranquil Victoria suburb of Ararat. “Alice kept secrets” says a school friend at the start of the film, “she kept the fact that she kept secrets a secret.” Like the ill-fated Laura Palmer of Lynch’s TV series, Alice Palmer also has a diary that when discovered opens the door to deeper mysteries. Like Bill Pullman’s apartment in Lost Highway, every corner of the Palmer’s family home becomes filled with a sticky darkness in which something disturbing lurks.

This will not be a film for everyone, there is no gore, there is little in the way of conventional shocks moments, it is extremely low key. But if you wait until dark, draw the curtains, and submit to its fragile spell this is a film that is genuinely creepy and creates a palpable sense of awful dread. Ultimately Lake Mungo packs a powerful emotional punch with an ending that reverberates long after the film has finished.