Quiet horror films are sometimes thoughtful little gems. I’d completely missed Lake Mungo when it came out. An Australian indie, it’s a mostly gentle ghost story that leaves you with an eerie feeling, and perhaps a little sad. Ghosts can be so resonant. Yet the Poe-esque death of a beautiful woman—a teen, in this case—makes it kind of poetic. The Palmer family is having a Christmas picnic (remember, southern hemisphere) at Ararat, where there’s a dam that allows for swimming. The two teens, Mathew and Alice, go into the water but only Mathew comes out. It takes some time for search and rescue divers to locate the body. Filmed as a mockumentary, the movie slowly adds details that make it all seem much more complex than an accidental drowning.
Alice, it turns out, has a life that her family knew nothing about. As various family members see her ghost, and even try to document it with cameras, their own motivations emerge. Mathew, wanting to help his parents cope, fakes a couple of photos and films suggesting his sister is still at the house. Everyone in the family experiences ghostly noises and a presence and they even consult a psychic, but nothing definitive comes to light. They do learn that Alice was more troubled than she ever let on. It was while at camp at the eponymous Lake Mungo that her own ghost came to her in a premonition of her death. Finally, the Palmers decide to move but in their final photograph of the house, a shadowy Alice can be seen remaining inside.
Ghosts are, by their very nature, religious. The deal with that universal that all religions address—what happens after death. The Palmer family is traumatized, but as the closing credit scenes make clear, Alice has really been there. The one church scene has some of their religious friends say that they don’t know how to comfort a family that doesn’t attend church. There’s a lot going on here. Even the name Ararat and the dam have meaning. This quiet, haunting film is not dissimilar from A Ghost Story, in some respects. Both reflect on the loss that a death has on loved ones, making them quite poignant because this is so very true of being human. Horror films can be a source of wonder rather than the slashers they’re generally assumed to be. I learned about Lake Mungo by word of mouth and I’m glad to have learned of it since, although fiction, it has something true to say.