Lake Mungo

For tonight's film I watched Lake Mungo, a film I watched way back when in 2011 for my first Horror Binge. My opinion hasn't changed much since then...

Lake Mungo seemed a fitting film to revisit after the shitfest I watched last night, as Lake Mungo understands everything right with found footage-esque horror making. The film is a faux-documentary (I hesitate to say mockumentary as that conjures a certain sense of comedy, of which this movie has none) that follows the death of a family's teenage daughter, Alice. Alice has some pretty major skeletons in her closet that still require a great deal of revealing even after death.

I think what I love most about this movie and what makes it so successful is one (hyphenated) word: multi-faceted. Sure, this is a movie about the spiritual world and it is scary in that sense, but moreso it's about the secrets family's keep, how we deal and grieve with death (both when we see it coming and when we don't), and the nature of life after death. This movie is surely a horror movie but it gives you a helluva lot more to chew on. It certainly does burn slow but it's well worth the journey, especially for the chilling climatic image that will stay with you for days. What if we could see our own fate coming for us?

This truly is a movie for both the horror aficionado (hey there!) and the non-horror fan alike. Lake Mungo asks big questions and holds many secrets, just like it's characters.

9/10