Lake Mungo (film)

Sixteen-year-old Alice Palmer drowns while swimming with her family at a dam in Ararat, Australia. Following the tragedy, her teenaged brother Mathew sets up video cameras around the house to record what seem to be images of Alice's ghost appearing in the family home. They consult psychic Ray Kemeny for insight on the apparent haunting, but he is unable to provide explanation. It is discovered that Mathew was actually setting up the "sightings" of his dead sister to give the family reason to exhume her body and give his mother closure. However, upon closer review, one of the hoax videos captures Alice's bedroom being searched by Brett, a neighbor for whom she had worked as a babysitter. After her own search of the bedroom, Alice's mother June finds a hidden videotape showing Alice in a sexual encounter with Brett and his wife.

Ray admits that Alice had met with him several months before her death and had told him she was having dreams about drowning, being dead and her mother not being able to see or help her. Alice's boyfriend comes forward with cell phone footage showing Alice during a school trip to Lake Mungo, in which she frantically digs into the sand at the base of a tree with her bare hands. The Palmers travel to Lake Mungo and find the tree, where they dig up her cell phone. The footage on the phone shows her walking down the shoreline of the lake and encountering a corpse-like doppelgänger of herself, appearing just as her body had been found in the lake.

The Palmers move out of their house, feeling that Alice had simply wanted them to know who she really was and what she had seen. The family now believes that the haunting has ended and Alice's ghost has moved on. The film ends with a family photo of the Palmers on the front lawn of their house as the figure of Alice watches from the window. The credits are inter-cut with prior footage, revealing several sightings of Alice's ghost throughout the film that had gone unnoticed.

The bulk of the film was written in 2005. Anderson was finding it difficult to acquire funding for another script he had written which required a much larger budget. After discussions with what would be future collaborators on Lake Mungo, the decision was made to write something that could be filmed on a low budget. When asked what inspired the script, Anderson has said, "I don't think it's a supernatural thriller. I think it's meant to be an exploration of grief." He also cited a curiosity as to how "technology is used to record people's lives and sort of tracks memories, and how technology mediates a lot of our experiences". Initial funding was attained through private investors, after which the production team approached the Australian government film funding body Screen Australia and received further funding. During casting, low profile actors were sought in an effort to maintain an authentic documentary feel. The film was shot over a period of approximately five weeks using multiple film and video formats. There was no written dialogue in the script, only the outline of the story, so the actors were tasked with improvising their scenes. The director served as the offscreen interviewer in the many documentary style interview scenes that compose the film.[2][3]

The film was screened in Austin, Texas (USA) at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March 2009.[4] In Australia, the film was at the Travelling Film Festival Wagga Wagga on 13 March 2009.[5] Lake Mungo was screened in the United Kingdom on 17 March at the Barbican London Australian Film Festival.[6] The film ran in the United States on 21 January 2010 at After Dark Horrorfest with distribution from Lionsgate and After Dark Films.[7]

In its limited release, Lake Mungo was met with critical acclaim. It currently has earned a 94% approval rating based on 17 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.[8] The aggregate website has not declared an official consensus, due to the small number of qualifying reviews, however.

Very early, before the film was officially released, Variety named it an "ambitious, restrained and well-mounted mockumentary", and praised the score, but critiqued other production elements, such as bad lighting and apparent lack of scripted dialogue.[9] The review indicates that the critic, Russell Edwards, detected unrealized potential.

On the other hand, Andrew L. Urban of Urban Cinefile said that "this superbly constructed and executed film gets everything right, to the smallest detail, as it draws us into the imagined scenario."[10] Simon Foster of the SBS declared the film "one of the most impressive debut films from this country in many years" and further commented that "the young director has created a nerve-rattler unlike any film the Australian industry has produced."[11] In a review for Hollywood Reporter, Megan Lehmann echoed these sentiments, noting the film's "compelling slow build", "surreal atmospherics", and "restrained soundtrack that works on a primal level", that "cleaves close to reality". She heralded its fusion of supernatural elements with substantive themes on family and loss, concluding that "this ambitious exploration of death and its aftershocks will reward more discerning genre fans".[12]

Several other critics agreed about its style and thematic depth. Thomas Caldwell conceded that "the entire film may be a construct", but found that "the skilled direction, writing and acting give Lake Mungo a spooky authenticity", awarding it ✦✦✦½✧ (3 1/2 stars out of 5).[13] Writing on Quickflix, Simon Miraudo evaluated the movie to be "a mournful, dreamlike examination of the hole left in the heart of a family after a death",[14] and awarded it ✦✦✦✦✦ (5 stars).

Chris Stuckmann called the film "an underappreciated, underseen gem" in a YouTube review[15] published in October of 2019. Ryan Hollinger published a video in 2018 entitled "The Saddest Horror Movie You've Never Seen"[16] which had helped promulgate the film to a wider audience.

• List of ghost films
• Cinema of Australia

• Lake Mungo on IMDb
• Lake Mungo on RT
• Lake Mungo on AllMovie
• Lake Mungo on Letterboxd
• Lake Mungo on TV Tropes