after the stinker that was Be My Cat, i figured i'd come back and christen this category with one of the most profound, deeply disturbing and deeply depressing found footage horror movies of this century thus far. yes, we're taking it there. this is, hands down, one of the best found footage movies, and i'll explain why. also, i may be biased or whatever. this is my shrine, and you're reading the ramblings of a madman obsessed with horror movies. so. idk what to tell you :p buckle up, bc this one's gonna be a long one lol
man, 2008. what a year for horror! a year that gave us Splinter, Cloverfield, Martyrs, The Strangers, Let The Right One In AND...! *drumroll* Laaake Mungooooo! hits after hits after hits. it seems like even-numbered years are the lucky numbers we need for genre-defining horror. idk, maybe that's just superstition. anyways, here's Lake Mungo to really set the bar for what we expect of a supernatural found footage movie. step aside, Paranormal Activity... this movie makes that one look like a pixar production.
no, no scary boogeymen pop up on the screen (well... except for one perfect time), no gore sprays anywhere and there are certainly no demons... except for the ones that haunt everyone in their day-to-day lives.
let's set the scene, because this movie does an absolutely impeccable job of doing it, so i'll try my best to copy it for this shrine entry's sake: we're in Australia, watching a documentary of a family who suddenly and tragically lost their daughter. of course, we the audience know that this is a fake mockumentary since it's... a film. but it's still cleverly hidden in a way that if someone watched this movie at like 2am by accident on tv one blurry night, they just might be convinced that this is the real deal. it is filmed PERFECTLY, you could possibly pop this on the tv even today and still be able to convince your clueless family members that like, no, guys seriously... this is real! it's about a family who lost their daughter but it's soooo wild. almost as wild as tiger king!
i lowkey believe that most netflix documentaries that go viral took notes from the way that this movie travels through a shocking plotline in the waythat it does. Don't Fuck With Cats, tiger king, and all of the other sensationalist documentaries that that streaming site spits out (esp between the years of 2019-til whenever the fuck) oddly have like... similar plot structures and twists and turns and shit that this movie does. and this movie does it all well. it just does.
if you wanna watch one of those movies masquerading as documentaries done gracefully and effectively, look no further than this lil Australian gem. you'll also not feel as guilty after watching it like you do with a netflix doc, since we know the characters are all fictional and no one's tragedies are being exploited for lump sums of cash. wink!
we open on an emergency phone call recorded by the local police station-- classic. a mother is speaking frantically about her daughter going missing, and there being a dam. whooaaa. the opening of all those spooky victorian ghost photos to the tune of the world's most dread-inducing music ever used in a mockumentary paints the picture clearly, beautifully, all under 3 minutes. we know what we're in for; this girl was probably gonna be dead by the end of the flick.
then, one by one, we're introduced to the family members who are still alive. the mother, brother and the father. i'm gonna keep calling them that bc the only person's name i remember is alice's :p other suspects enter the scenes at various times, but the important part is the family taking centerstage.
they recount the Event the way they remembered it happening interlaid between some news clips of the search and eerie home video footage. it's classic! claaassic. it's like watching citizen kane, like going to ground zero and seeing where it all started. it felt nostalgic in a way that i can't quite place, like i've even seen this movie before, even when i knew i hadn't. it just has that fuzzy quality to it baked into every frame, no matter how hi res your flatscreen tv is. it instantly transports you into Ararat, Australia in 2-thousand-and-eight. the vibes are simply that powerful.
i was instantly sucked back into 2008 when i first moved to a different state and had a single crt tv to my name, which i used to watch more creepy horror whenever possible. everything was just simply so ominous. it's perfect.
the characters were instantly believable, so absolutely stellar casting choices on the crew's part. you really do believe that this is a typical middle class suburban Australian family with a typical suburban middle class Australian life. except for the horrors, of course.
we learn that this family lowkey expected their daughter not to return back from the lake that they went to on vacation (oops, i mean on holiday) just moments prior to disaster striking. their daughter turned up missing and uh. yeah, they were waiting for authorities to give them the bad news. damn. but, hey, prepare for the worst but hope for the best i guess. sadly, they're not mistaken... alice is indeed dead. the cops pull up her bloated body from the waters and pronounce her dead on the scene. she literally looks like styrofoam when they do, so i don't blame the coroner for saying "it's curtains, mate" and closing the case.
strangely enough, after the body was identified by the father as indeed belonging to his daughter (and oh god the haunted look in the dad's eyes when he tries to convince us or himself or the camera or idk what that "it was what fathers do. so i went to claim the body." shudder.) the family car stalled right there on the spot, and the only way to drive back home was in reverse. foreshadowing? who knows!
they get back, promptly and obviously start losing their minds with grief in the only ways they knew how, but never really coming to terms what they were grieving exactly, start getting antsy. something is wrong. something ain't quite right. shit starts getting stirred when ppl post their own home footage and photos of that very same lake and start seeing things in trees. things that look like someone they know, wandering the lake months after her demise. things that make the family kinda... suspect that maybe alice wasn't actually dead.
several of these photos show up around the house out of the blue... until! plot twist? it was the brother coping with his grief by overlaying old photos of alice that he took over recent photos of the house. photography and video is his hobby, you see. he fesses up almost immediately once they're found, and we're kinda left disappointed for a minute, before looking at the timestamp and still seeing we have more than an hour left of the movie to go.
we're introduced to a psychic named ray who insists he isn't a magician but still wants to use his gifts to help ppl on his radio show that he makes money off of. yeah. we're visiting this guy bc i guess we're trying to see if alice is a ghost now that they've confirmed for realsies this time that alice is dead. like actually.
the mom wants to see him so she can try and get over her grief of having lost her daughter... like months after the fact. months. you get the idea that this family is a little... weird. a little emotionally constipated, the poor folks. ray stays like a thread that won't go away for another few key moments, but by the end, he fades away. so if you don't like ray, it's cool. he's not gonna overstay his welcome
everything is paced and revealed flawlessly, every twist and dissapointing turn only to lead into another intruiging little rabbithole are masterfully woven into this giant fucked up tapestry of tears and horror.
the horror is incredibly subtle. the horror isn't ghosts... well, not the ones we usually think of when we think of the word "ghosts" anyways. the horror is something much more deep, more... visceral in how it can grip anyone living in these isolated times in history the way that it can. i feel like ppl who have had loneliness and disconnect haunting them thru their entire lives can understand.
secrets keep getting unraveled every 15 minutes or so, and eventually ray ends up being revealed as being alice's psychic not too long before alice's untimely demise. oh yeah, and alice is revealed to have had a p scandalous double-life, sleeping with the neighbors at the tender age of 16... all under every single person's nose, which i find hard to believe. even if she was going over under the guise of babysitting the neighbor's kids, that's still like... a 16 yo got away with that? holy shit. not even her friends knew. that is wild.
but anyways, ray. ray, ray, ray. this is the last that we speak of him, bc that dude is a pretty sketchy character. he's presented as dubious and that guy does not seem to be beating any allegations anytime soon, even by the end of the story. he gave alice a hypno session and talked about why she felt like she was gonna die soon. like anxiety, but maybe 10x worse. she closed her eyes, just like her mother closed her eyes to sit down with the very same guy months prior, and picture their house. they're both walking thru it... but the end reveals that they were both walking in their own imaginations together, and yet alice's mother still couldn't see her.
the exact same way that no one could ever see alice for what she was, or who she was. they were always framing her story in the context of their lives, and everyone was always coming up with a brand new piece. it speaks volumes that this girl was a completely different character thru her entire life, and no one was the wiser until she finally died. my god. how unbelievably sad is that?
and now i'm not gonna spoil the ending. i'll leave you, the reader, to ponder the horror of being not only just invisible in life, but also in death as well. there was a poster of this movie whose tagline was "alice died in lake munfo in dec of 2005. but her nightmare still didn't end there." like..........
like?!?!?
i am flabbergasted. are you KIDDING me?!
i can imagine nothing more horrifying than that. to shun vulnerability so hard you're effectively rendered into a ghost, a shell of a person that no one really cares about beyond how you fit into their life. and when the plug is pulled, the entire carnival just shuts down. it is insane. i am chewing the bARS OF MY ENCLOSURE
and there are LAYERS to this, you guys. layers!!! you have got to watch this movie if you haven't already, i'm bursting at the seams to not spoil this movie bc it is just that good. it is deeply uncomfortable, and when i tell you how fast my jaw DROPPED when i watched the ending. like, bruh. oh my god. i died.
it's so dumb, bc horror movies are not a monolith, and horror subgenres aren't a monolith, either. many movies can juggle multiple hats, being horror, supernatural, thriller, drama, psychological horror AND existential horror all at the same time. like? it is 2024, ppl need to get with the program. this movie is like deep, hard-hitting existential horror to the max if you're not fucking stupid. i say this bc if you search up reviews after watching and find a bunch of 1 and 2-star reviews on it, understand that in 2008, ppl did Not Understand psychological supernatural horror. it would take until like 2013 or 2014 for most ppl to hop onto existential wave in mainstream culture.
but even more recent reviews leave me baffled. if you rate this movie anything under a 6, you're a loser.
which is why i rate this one a perfect 10/10! hell yeah.
this is peak psychological/ found footage/ supernatural/ existential horror for me, and that is not a small feat to achieve. to be able to perfectly balance sincerity, isolation, discomfort, drama, AND superstition all into one perfectly packaged hour and fifty seven minute runtime. it is just like... my god. completely bone-chillingly real horror about not just grief, but connection. ohhhh my god are you fucken kidding me
the crew behind lake mungo have got to applaud themselves for this one until they die, bc they fucking killed that shit. hit it all right out of the ballpark, went str8 to hall of fame. even I Saw The TV Glow didn't wrench my soul out of my body and tear it asunder with such vim and vigor than this movie did. i think i can't even remember the last time i was wracked with this much grief since i was 19... like oh my god. imagine watching this in a theatre? nah, dawg. you have to watch this on a tv you usually watch documentaries on. even if it's just a phone or a tablet, just to get that sweet sweet immersion in, and the chance to get cozy. you must get cozy in sweatpants or pjs if you do, bc you just gotta. the level of bone-rattling depression you'll get from this movie's ending will probably knock you out cold otherwise.
if you hate vague endings and don't have two neurons to fire up a spark together in your head, then... maybe give this one a pass. this one's for the girlies who fuckin love to overanalyze everything. it's that psychological. it's kind of a pretentious horror film, complete with a jumpscare baked lovingly into its plot, but if you wanna sit a special loved one down and begin to dissect whatever the hell it was that you just watched, then yeah. this one's the one. this one is for the anxiety havers and the lonely people of the world.
okay, wow. i think i'm done kissing ass now LMFAO
yeah, if it wasn't obvious enough, i'd more than reccommend this movie to any horror movie connoisseur, just to round out their palet and chew on something different for once. this movie is no Paranormal Activity or Ghostwatch, but it's still a hell of a spine-tingling time nonetheless. the visuals of the horrors in the footage and the way that this movie is so grounded in reality and yet so far detached, like something happening in a different dimension, or in a dream... it's just all masterfully done.
i'm kissing the ground that this movie walks on. et cetera, et cetera
hooray!!! a home run! a perfect 10/10 movie. this is it, folks. now you know the standards i have and the values i hold dear. if you hate this movie, kick rocks. this ain't the site for you, log off. literally nobody has done it like lake mungo and no one ever will. also, if you liked Hereditary or anything from a24, give this movie a looksee >_> lemme know what you think lol
anyways, that concludes my ted talk on how lake mungo is one of the best, if not Thee Best found footage horror film ever constructed this century to date. it's a tough contender for Best Horror Movie out there, as we still have so many stellar hits to review and consider yet, but this movie is lich-ra-lly one of my top 10 ultimate fave horror movies ever, and baby... it is not number 10.
alright! that's enough meatriding for tonight. bye :3
thx for reading!
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