Why Lake Mungo is the best ghost film you’ve… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Why Lake Mun­go is the best ghost film you’ve nev­er seen

28 Oct 2017

Words by Thomas Hobbs

Three people - a young man, a middle-aged man, and a middle-aged woman - stand together in front of a house with trees in the background.
Three people - a young man, a middle-aged man, and a middle-aged woman - stand together in front of a house with trees in the background.
This Aussie indie hor­ror from 2008 is the per­fect super­nat­ur­al chiller to watch this Halloween.

Grief can do strange things to a fam­i­ly. When my father unex­pect­ed­ly passed away when I was just four-years-old, our family’s grief man­i­fest­ed itself in shared expe­ri­ences of para­nor­mal activ­i­ty’. For years, the con­ser­va­to­ry win­dow (a room my dad fre­quent­ed while alive) would knock repeat­ed­ly, my feet would get touched by cold fin­ger­tips at 3AM and shad­owy fig­ures would appear and then dis­ap­pear in the hall­way. You see, when some­body you love los­es their life sud­den­ly, the human brain becomes com­plete­ly scram­bled: what you might per­ceive as real­i­ty isn’t always the case.

Few films con­vey this griev­ing process bet­ter than 2008 psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror Lake Mun­go, a mod­ern indie clas­sic that some­how failed to get UK dis­tri­b­u­tion upon release. It chill­ing­ly employs a faux doc­u­men­tary and found-footage for­mat to tell the sto­ry of the Palmer fam­i­ly, who are attempt­ing to come to terms with the strange drown­ing death of their daugh­ter Alice. As they each strug­gle (it tran­spires Alice’s mum bleak­ly breaks into the homes of neigh­bours pure­ly to step into some­body else’s shoes) to adjust to a new real­i­ty, Alice starts reap­pear­ing in her brother’s pho­tos. Is she call­ing out to her fam­i­ly from beyond the grave? Or is her ghost mere­ly an illu­sion fuelled by grief?

Lake Mun­go suc­ceeds because there isn’t one stage where you ques­tion the family’s pain. Alice’s father Rus­sell has a for­lorn look in his eyes, which sug­gests he hasn’t been sleep­ing, yet remains deter­mined not to take any time off work. Her moth­er June is paral­ysed with regret and shiv­ers as she talks. Mean­while, Matthew, Alice’s broth­er, pours him­self into pho­tog­ra­phy as a dis­trac­tion away from what has hap­pened to his sis­ter. For any­one that’s ever lost a fam­i­ly mem­ber pre­ma­ture­ly, these char­ac­ters are all recog­nis­able arche­types of those who are left behind. Sub­se­quent­ly, when each of the Palmers start talk­ing about a haunt­ing, you hang onto every sin­gle word. The film’s talk­ing head set-up cre­ates a pow­er­ful sense of fore­bod­ing that refresh­ing­ly avoids the genre’s usu­al reliance on gore.

When June recalls being com­fort­ed after Alice’s death, she says: It felt weird hav­ing my moth­er there with me with­out Alice around – it felt like the wrong order.” This quote sig­ni­fies Lake Mun­go isn’t just a con­ven­tion­al ghost sto­ry but just as much an enig­ma around how death can dis­rupt the nat­ur­al cycle of life. The fam­i­ly lat­er find Alice’s mobile phone, which she mys­te­ri­ous­ly buried dur­ing a camp­ing trip with friends. On it is a grainy video clip of Alice walk­ing through the dark and spot­ting a mys­te­ri­ous fig­ure on the hori­zon. As it draws clos­er and clos­er, the figure’s blurred face looks uncom­fort­ably famil­iar. There isn’t a ratio­nal expla­na­tion for what Alice sees, much like there isn’t a ratio­nal expla­na­tion for the unpre­dictabil­i­ty of death itself.

It prob­a­bly isn’t a coin­ci­dence Alice shares a sur­name with Twin Peaks’ Lau­ra Palmer. And much like David Lynch’s icon­ic mur­dered school­girl, it’s slow­ly revealed that before her untime­ly death Alice was way above her head in seedy activ­i­ties as well as secret meet­ings with a psy­chol­o­gist. Alice kept secrets about the fact she kept secrets,” her broth­er Matthew recalls. But rather than ampli­fy­ing Alice’s murky world with dark Lynchi­an sur­re­al­ist fan­ta­sy, the low-bud­get Aus­tralian hor­ror opts to ground her back­sto­ry in believ­able every­day reality.

Matthew lat­er admits to stag­ing the pho­tographs and films that Alice’s sup­posed ghost appears in. This is a com­plete­ly com­mon side effect of grief – being unable to let some­body go. As I have found, when you’re griev­ing, the sound of the cen­tral heat­ing kick­ing in takes on a whole dif­fer­ent mean­ing. How­ev­er, just when it feels like the film’s reached a con­clu­sive expla­na­tion for the Palmer’s haunt­ing, one final twist arises.

This is a twist that will strike a chord with any­one who has ever claimed to have expe­ri­enced some­thing para­nor­mal as while log­ic will point to some­thing fic­ti­tious, there’s always that doubt in the back of your mind that says you might have expe­ri­enced some­thing authen­tic. That maybe just like Alice Palmer, a deceased loved one was wan­der­ing around in the dark of the night wait­ing to catch your eye.

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