Lake Mungo (2008, Joel Anderson) (Patreon)

60/100

Torn between three assessments, feeling like a fool. To the extent that Lake Mungo is attempting to be scary, I think it's kind of terrible. To the extent that Lake Mungo is attempting to be devastating, I think it's kind of awesome. To the extent that Lake Mungo is attempting to be both scary and devastating at once, I think it's kind of misguided. 

Having gone in with zero foreknowledge—didn't even know that it's a mock-doc—I spent most of what you'd call Act One in in a state of supreme exasperation, thinking up such pseudo-clever knocks as Paranormal Stasis. Even calibrating for the fact that Lake Mungo was made 15 years ago, right in Activity #1's wake, its conceit seemed tediously familiar, struggling to generate creepiness from ostensibly ghostly images that look clumsily Photoshopped. The circumstances of Alice's death, while sad, are unremarkable, and for a good stretch there really isn't much of a hint as to why she'd be haunting her family. Plus, while Anderson seemingly does a solid job of replicating this sort of low-budget cable doc, there's a reason for that ass-covering adverb: I don't watch those, 'cause they're trash. Only the fact that someone had expressed enthusiasm about my seeing Lake Mungo totally cold afforded me a smidgen of hope. There must be something more to this, I thought/prayed. 

[Significant SPOILERS below.]

Indeed there is...though the grenade gets dropped casually enough to make you think "Wait a minute." (This is where the format pays off—it's crucial that everyone's talking about events that have already happened, and with which they've made their peace. Retroactively justifies the family's bland demeanor.) Anderson alllllmost does something brilliant, a sort of reverse Audition: Where Miike's film is a demented gorefest perfectly disguised, at first, as a genteel romantic drama, Lake Mungo—or so I briefly thought—turns out to be a sober psychological drama perfectly disguised as an undistinguished horror movie. Obviously, one of those gearshifts is much more galvanizing than the other, and it helps that Audition works equally well in its deliberately misleading first half, such that I'd have been quite happy to see it continue in that vein right to the end. But the revelation that those apparent Photoshop jobs actually are Photoshop jobs, and that Mathew manufactured all of the spooky shit in a ludicrously convoluted effort to help his mother accept that Alice is gone, triggered the same absurdist-grief-management receptors that make Exotica and The Game and Truly, Madly, Deeply some of my all-time favorites. I don't know exactly where Anderson could have taken this, and he'd have been courting anger from genre hounds, but the idea that Lake Mungo isn't actually a ghost story at all excited me enormously.

But then I remembered that Dad had claimed to see Alice in her room—something Mathew couldn't possibly have faked. And before I could work up any sort of rationalization, Anderson began serving up additional ghostly images, recorded in Mathew's absence. So the twist became a double-twist, with the fabricated visitation obscuring a real one. That would have felt like a betrayal, were it not for the extremely weird adjunct in which one previously unnoticed blurry figure turns out to be a neighbor who snuck into the house to retrieve the motherfucking sex tape that he and his wife made with Alice. How consensual that relationship was never quite became clear to me, but either way, its out-of-nowhere nature seems absolutely crucial to Lake Mungo's powerfully mournful ending, which sees Alice's family heal and quite literally move on from someone who's been unsuccessfully trying to get their attention, who's become as unseen in death as she apparently was in life. 

Sounds great, no? Problem is, I have no idea what any of that has to do with Lake Mungo itself, and the vision of her impending doom that Alice captures there on her phone. Nor is it clear to me how Mathew's deceit dovetails with either. That we never get a clear sense of who Alice was, even in the home video footage we're shown, works beautifully for one aspect of the film but is a serious liability in other aspects. There are too many aspects, basically. "Dead girl's brother engineers elaborate fake haunting to help his grief-stricken parents achieve closure" could be a terrific, deeply sad movie, and "Dead girl's family eventually starts ignoring evidence of her (true) haunting, because confronting it would entail reckoning with who she actually was" could be a terrific, deeply sad movie. But they can't both be the same terrific, really sad movie. Anderson needed to pick one of them. Still, that last lonely image of Alice watching her family leave her behind tugs at me a bit.