There’s a great line from one of my favorite non-horror films, Unforgiven: “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away everything he’s got, and everything he’s ever going to have.” It captures, I think, the yawning, gaping emptiness that comes with grief; the inescapable absence. When someone dies, it’s not just them that’s gone, it’s also all of the future days you’re never going to have together, all of the chances you’d have to make amends for things you regretted saying or doing, any chance to watch them change or grow.
All of those things are gone, and though I think it’s something easily enough appreciated intellectually, it’s hard to really communicate how it feels, that feeling of finality and the regrets that come with it. One of the things, then, that makes Lake Mungo such an accomplishment, apart from being a ghost story told with skill and restraint, is the way it communicates the specific impacts of grief on the people who experience it. There are a lot of emotional notes that horror can hit, but sorrow isn’t one that gets a lot of attention, and this film does it really well.
It’s presented as a documentary, about the tragic drowning of 17-year-old Alice Palmer during a weekend outing with her parents June and Russell, and her younger brother Mathew. One moment she’s swimming with her brother, the next she’s just…gone. It’s some time before divers manage to recover her body, and Russell takes on the difficult job of identifying her. Alice is gone. One day she’s there, the next she’s not, and each of the surviving Palmers deals with it in their own way. Russell throws himself into his work. June starts taking midnight walks and peering into other people’s houses, desperate to step outside of her own life. Mathew takes photographs.
And then they start hearing strange noises in the middle of the night. And Mathew starts noticing figures in his photographs.
Figures that look like Alice.
There are a number of ways the story could have gone from here, but instead of leaning hard into scares, it leans hard into the grief that the Palmers are feeling and how it affects the way they think. Russell doesn’t know what to believe - after all, he saw Alice’s body. But June wants so much to believe that Alice is still alive that even Russell starts to doubt himself. Mathew sets up cameras all over the house, trying to see what else he can capture. Eventually, June contacts a psychic. It never tips over into histrionics - their coping methods may not be especially healthy, but they don’t abandon all reason. Mostly what you feel is an impairment in their ability to really communicate with each other - they don’t want to upset or hurt each other, so they keep secrets from each other, let things go unsaid. This is a really common human tendency, there’s nothing unbelievable or melodramatic about it.
But there’s a real tension that develops from this - on the one hand, they’re not telling each other everything, and on the other, they’re desperately searching for explanations, for some way to understand why Alice is gone. So they’re keeping some secrets and digging into others. And this leads to some interesting narrative reversals as the film goes on. What we thought was one thing turns out to be another, new information comes to light, and it turns out that Alice was keeping secrets of her own. As a couple of characters put it, she wasn’t just keeping secret - she was even keeping secret the fact that she had secrets. There were things that Alice didn’t tell anyone about, and so you have this wounded family trying to explain this mysterious presence while not telling each other the whole truth, and so, like any good documentary, as the narrative unwinds our expectations are upended as new explanations come to light. We think it’s one thing, then another, only for an important discovery in the third act to make us question everything all over again.
Also, like any good horror film presented as a documentary, the filmmakers handle the narrative conceit deftly by playing it completely straight. It’s really, really easy for horror filmmakers to screw up a documentary or found-footage conceit by tipping their hand too early, by signposting that something scary and bad is going to happen, when that’s not really how really good documentaries work. Real documentaries are narratives too, and often use pretty standard storytelling devices to craft a particular narrative, including sudden, dramatic revelations. You don’t always want to tell your audience too much about what is coming, and horror films that position themselves as documentaries of one sort or another all too often don’t trust in the restraint that requires, and instead do things like open with title cards describing the “horrible, indescribable events of that night” or something like that, or worse, try to inject scary imagery in the middle of it like the documentary itself is haunted or something like that. It’s trying too hard, and usually the film suffers as a result. Here, the filmmakers give us a documentary first - lots of cleanly produced talking-head segments, with consistently solid, naturalistic performances, interspersed with believable archival footage. The news broadcasts look like news broadcasts, the family photographs look like family photographs, the home movies look like home movies. It might not seem like a big deal,, but those sort of mundane, naturalistic things can be some of the toughest to fake if you don’t have a good eye for detail, and since we’re so used to see stuff like that in our everyday lives, any artificiality tends to leap out and ruin our immersion in the story.
The archival footage does a lot of hard work here on its own - a big part of this film is the Palmers believing what they do on the base of photographic and video evidence, and this is all based on early-00s technology, so the level of imprecision contained in the visual evidence reflects the shaky subjectivity on which the Palmers rely to shore up their belief that Alice isn’t entirely gone. Photos are blurry and dimly lit, video footage is grainy and distorted, phone-camera footage is pixelated and low-resolution. It all could be what the Palmers think it is, but could just as easily be something else. Even home-movie footage of Alice is often blurry, as if she’s already fading from memory despite her family’s best efforts.
There are also lots of long, moodily-lit insert shots of the house, hallways and empty rooms which work on a couple of different levels. First, they help establish the sort of atmosphere that a documentary about possible supernatural occurrences would want to establish - plenty of good haunted-house films have shots of empty rooms and hallways as part of their arsenal, but here, accompanying those shots with voicer-over instead of spooky music helps them to read less like a haunted-house film than documentarians trying to capture that same feeling. It’s subtle, but important. Second, they reinforce the sense of emptiness and absence that the Palmers are feeling. The house is a little emptier than it should be, and so it also reads like an attempt to convey the sadness and the grief the Palmers are feeling as well. And because the whole thing reads so much like a documentary about the subject matter rather than a piece of fiction dressed as a documentary, it’s easy to get engaged with it, which makes the third-act revelations and conclusion hit that much harder.
And it’s that third act that really brings the film home. We go on this journey with the Palmers as they look for some kind of explanation for the inexplicable, and they do get closure of a sort, but it’s not really neat or clean in any way, and as the final credits roll, we’re denied any neat conclusions as well. It takes some time to pay off, but it does in a way that settles a bone-deep chill on you, one that is equal parts horror and sadness. Some people can move on with their lives, and others will never, ever have that chance, because was taken away from them, along with everything else they were ever going to have.
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