The precipitous rise and fall of found footage horror over the last 24 years since The Blair Witch Project’s release has said a lot about how we interact with the world around us, especially as it pertains to the internet and our increasingly advanced ability to record our own lived experiences. Though it mostly consists of shaky footage of characters running away from things we cannot see, Blair Witch was frightening through the implication that what it showed was real. The threat was always lingering somewhere behind the frame, or barely visible amidst the digital noise. Much like how we experience real fear, it utilized emotion, an understanding that what’s scariest comes often not from what we see, but what we feel.
Yet, as the internet has become more pervasive, the mystery of these vague, liminal images has begun to lose its luster. It’s all too easy to prove that “three film students” didn’t, in fact, go missing in the Black Hills of Maryland. The ambiguity gained by blurring the line between fact and fiction is much harder to achieve. This is what makes Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo so impressive. Not only is the Australian found footage mockumentary still scary, but 15 years after its release, it feels remarkably real.
Anderson’s directorial debut, and sadly to date, his sole feature film, is a relatively low-budget, $1.2 million effort that released in 2007 to criminally little attention. Purporting to be a documentary and utterly committed to that format, Lake Mungo depicts the unsettling events that befall the Palmer family after the death of their teenage daughter, Alice (Talia Zucker), from drowning. Processing the grief from this sudden, devastating loss, the Palmers begin to sense a dark energy in the house. Alice’s mother, June (Rosie Traynor), experiences vivid nightmares of her daughter standing at the head of their bed. Meanwhile, their son Matthew (Martin Sharpe) decides to set up a camera, and soon begins to see a ghostly presence in the frames. Anderson allows the story to unfold with patient and ominous subtlety. “Alice kept secrets,” a friend is interviewed as saying, “she kept the fact that she kept secrets a secret.” As an eerie past is slowly unveiled, so is a family’s experience with irrevocable grief, coming face-to-face with the ghostly horror of the inexplicable hole that has been torn in their center.
The first thing that stands out about Lake Mungo is how impressively it adheres to the documentary structure. There are no cheap jump scares, or moments that would cause the viewer to doubt the veracity of the film’s reality. Every character is real, their dialogue naturalistic and emotionally illuminative. The film was shot without a script, instead adhering to a strict narrative outline, but this is an attribute rather than a flaw. We come to know these characters as people rather than victims, so that with each new discovery they make, we feel the same dread and urge to understand that they do. Special praise should be given to David Pledger, who imbues Alice’s father, Russell, with a deep and authentic pain that’s genuinely heart-wrenching, but there’s not a weak performance in the bunch.
Also worthy of commendation is the camerawork by cinematographer John Brawley, who captures darkly beautiful shots of the film’s Australian locale that are utterly drenched in atmosphere. The home movies, also, feel quite genuine. Though the actors aren’t related, there’s a real similarity in their appearances that make their identity as a family convincing. The low-resolution photography of Matthew’s camera during the found footage segments activates the imagination to see forms in the darkness that may or may not be there, a big source of the movie’s nerve-rattling energy. What you’re seeing isn’t always so obvious, though, and Anderson trusts the audience to follow along with Lake Mungo’s various subtle twists and turns without ever holding their hand. The film both narratively and tonally resembles a documentary version of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, not just because the family’s name is the Palmers, but because of the tangible dread that the unraveling narrative induces.
That’s not to say Lake Mungo doesn’t contain some more straightforward horror thrills, though. The film builds to a terrifying dénouement, with a perversely disturbing image that will linger in the heads of viewers long after they’ve finished watching. Anderson builds to this by utilizing simple but effective tricks to get under your skin. Shots slowly zero in to reveal the presence of ghosts in areas where you didn’t previously see them, accompanied by the familiar sound of a digital zoom. The digital noise present in these images only serves to emphasize the subliminal quality of what haunts the Palmers, and ultimately, Alice. Again, the film presents these sequences as unraveling elements of a puzzle. Like a good documentary, it metes out its most impactful images to emphasize discovery over constant fright.
Much of the tension in Mungo relies on inexplicability, feeling the presence of something sinister without fully understanding what it is or why it’s chosen you. “I feel like something bad is going to happen to me,” Alice says in a videoed section, “I feel like something bad has happened. It hasn’t reached me yet but it’s on its way.” Hearing that doesn’t simply induce fright, but also sadness. With a compelling cast of characters and an intelligent, well-written story, Lake Mungo carves out a special place for itself in the annals of horror. It will be too patient and deliberately paced for some, but the genuine emotional depth Anderson achieves is what gives the film its lasting impact. Without spoiling, the story features a clever reversal of formula that makes the final takeaway surprisingly moving. Much like what director David Lowery explored with A Ghost Story, haunting, or being haunted, can be an experience of longing. Because that’s what ghostly sightings really remind us of, not of a secret presence, but of the echo of something that’s been taken away.
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