Lake Mungo
First screened and reviewed in October 2025
Director: Joel Anderson. Cast: Rosie Traynor, David Pledger, Martin Sharpe, Talia Zucker, Steve Jodrell, Judith Roberts, Robin Cuming, Tania Lentini, Chloe Armstrong, Marcus Costello, James Lawson, Carole Patullo, Glenn Luck, Charles Armytage, Michael Osmond Robinson, Natasha Herbert. Screenplay: Joel Anderson. In Brief:
Creepy, clever success with almost all facets of a heady concept. Makes very tricky aspects look easy–but never simple.
VOR:④
The Dadetown of horror movies. The Blair Witch of domestic heartbreak. Anderson works dark, tender, flickering magic with limited means.
A sad, spooky faux documentary that is also a found-footage horror movie that is not quite either of those things but borrows some of the most effective devices and unsettling resonances of both. A séance that is also a eulogy that is also a series of discoveries that is also a series of locked safes and closed doors, never to be opened (except sometimes). A preserved bedroom that is also a robbed grave. A 90-minute seminar in looking, really looking at the film frame, even as it continually lures you into thinking you've seen everything there is to see. A treatise about how all cinema and all photography have an ineluctable relationship to the macabre, and so do a lot of stories, and so do a lot of families, and so does frigging Australia. A movie that mostly employs a language of straightforward reportage with a heartbroken yearning to establish facts, but then reveals itself to also be skating along the slick obsidian surface of a metaphysical ouroboros, where a girl walking alone at night runs into herself, and at least one of those girls is already dead.
A real spine-tingler, with maybe one more plot twist, one more caught-on-video shocker, and one more seamy boudoir revelation than it needs, but is otherwise a model of fearsome streamlining and of ghost stories rooted in deep, deep empathy. A spidery pleasure on Halloween night. A skin-crawly impediment to falling asleep. A story about a lake with no water but plenty of buried secrets. A tale told by Shirley Jackson or Flannery O'Connor, somehow drowned yet somehow still whispering at the bottom of an Australian reservoir, whose visible surface is utterly still. Grade:B+
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
