Alice kept secrets. She kept the fact that she kept secrets a secret.
Main Cast: Rosie Traynor, David Pledger
Director: Joel Anderson
Each year there are movies produced that are never seen by the public. Their content is considered too graphic, too disturbing, too shocking for general audiences. This is one of those films.
I admit, when I first read the synopsis on the back of the LAKE MUNGO DVD box, I was not impressed.
“In Lake Mungo, sixteen-year-old Alice Palmer drowns while swimming in the local dam. When her body is recovered and a verdict of accidental death returned, her grieving family buries her. The family then experiences a series of strange and inexplicable events centered in and around their home. Profoundly unsettled, the Palmers seek the help of psychic and parapsychologist Ray Kemeny. Ray discovers that Alice led a secret, double life. A series of clues leads the family to Lake Mungo, where Alice’s secret past emerges.”
Meh. Ho hum. This should be interesting (said with dripping sarcasm). At least I can make a game of it by counting the idiotic jump scares.
Wow. I was dead friggin’ wrong. LAKE MUNGO is about the Palmer family dealing with the death and possible afterlife of their daughter Alice (Talia Zucker). They do discover Alice had a big secret. Did Alice’s secret lead to her death? No, not at all. As far as I could tell, Alice’s secret was just a plot device used to develop the story and allow Alice’s parents to start digging more into their daughter’s life and questioning how well they really knew her–which then leads to Lake Mungo. But Lake Mungo is not where “Alice’s secret past emerges”. Her family knew about that before they ever went to Lake Mungo.
LAKE MUNGO is told like a documentary, as if you’re watching an extended episode of some ghost show on TV–only with a brief flash of nudity and sexually explicit footage which I thought was one of the only unnecessary and gratuitous shots in the entire movie–holding interviews with Alice’s family and friends, showing videotape and photos taken before and after Alice’s death. There were no dramatic recreations, for which I was thankful as it would have undermined the integrity of the story’s pace and would have interrupted the narrative too much. Instead, writer/director Joel Anderson (in his first full-length movie) found much more interesting ways to inject footage of the living Alice into the story.
I’ve always held that ghosts are the only really frightening thing in horror literature, and movies about ghosts have, for me, so much more potential for building a sense of dread and unease in the viewer. LAKE MUNGO knows this and capitalizes on it. And does so without jump scares, which I couldn’t believe. In fact, the pace of this movie is so deliberately slow, your mind is going to wander in places, and I believe, in retrospect, that’s just what Anderson wants. Misdirection is a key ingredient to the success of this movie, and, man, Anderson works that angle like no one else.
Alice’s family, mother June (Rosie Traynor), father Russell (David Pledger), and brother Matthew (Martin Sharpe), turn in subtle, low-key performances, with David Pledger being the most affective. His mannerisms as he talks about his dead daughter and being the one to identify the body sent chills through me–not only as a father but as a viewer; he did an awesome job.
While I feel certain aspects of this story could have been handled better, with more subtlety and finesse, overall this just might be the best horror movie I saw in all of 2010–that includes every After Dark Horrorfest movie so far. This is one of those movies that sticks with you afterward and definitely makes you want to go back and watch it again, which I suspect I will be doing sooner rather than later. LAKE MUNGO is eerie and effective, and that’s just what a good horror movie should be.
Read more 8 Films to Die For reviews
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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