Andrew Brassleay revisits Lake Mungo on its 15th anniversary…
Found footage fake-documentary horror movie Lake Mungo is a slow-burner in more ways than one. Firstly, in its ever-increasing sense of dread, doom and fate; and secondly in its growing reputation as one of the scariest – and saddest – movies ever made.
The Australian psychological thriller – which delves into grief, secrets and loneliness – by director Joel Anderson – with his one and only feature – tells the story of the Palmer family: torn apart following the death of 16-year-old daughter Alice during a pre-Christmas family outing. While a film crew captures their grief, it becomes apparent that not only are they haunted by Alice in her death, but the teenager was haunted in life, too.
Fifteen years on from the movie’s original release, we take a look at its most nerve-jangling scenes. Spoiler alert!
That Opening
Lake Mungo’s horrors are all hidden in plain sight right at its beginning.
‘I feel like something bad is going to happen to me,’ says Alice (Talia Zucker) while images of Victorian spirit photography plays out on screen. ‘I feel like something bad has happened. It hasn’t reached me yet but it’s on its way.’ Before 80 seconds are up, we also find out that “Alice kept secrets. She kept the fact she kept secrets a secret,’ and are shown a seemingly harmless family photo backdropped by their home, which isn’t as happy as it first appears.
It’s chilling on first watch and even more so on repeated viewings, knowing what’s to come.
The Disappearance
June Palmer’s (Rose Traynor) heartbreaking call to emergency services reporting her disappearance during the trip to the dam lake is played out, before we see TV news footage of ambulance crews, divers and a brief image of a pair of white trainers left on the shore.
A snippet of every parent’s nightmare – Lake Mungo’s gritty realism adds to the horrors – who can listen to this and not feel the creeping dread of how their own family unit’s reality and sanity would be shattered in such a moment?
But it’s also the circumstances: her parents had been on the shore and would have heard any cries of distress; her brother, Mathew (Martin Sharpe) had been in the – completely still – waters with her. Just what had happened out there for this to result in tragedy?
The discovery
Divers find Alice’s body on – a wonderfully grim touch, this – Christmas Eve. Viewers are treated to horrendous flash-frame images of her decomposing body – initially, it seems in incredibly bad taste for a documentary crew to film this, but we discover there’s a very good reason for it later.
As if this isn’t enough, the Palmers’ car stalls on the journey back from identifying the body, leaving them having to drive back in reverse; a detail that adds fuel to their uncanny, unreal nightmare fuel.
June gets existential
Bizarre footage of funeral directors standing still and silent by a coffin; an empty church: and then June hits us with this absolute slammer of a quote: ‘Death takes everything eventually. It’s the meanest, dumbest machine there is, and it just keeps coming and it doesn’t care.’
Who needs jumps scares when there’s that to ponder? Brrr.
Spirit photography
In the days following the funeral, things go bump in the night at the Palmers. There are unexplained noises in Alice’s room; doors slams; June takes to wandering around the streets alone at night and entering other people’s homes; while dad Russell (David Pledger) finds escape in his work, but provides a spooky anecdote about being screamed at by Alice’s ghost when he sits in her room one time.
Meanwhile Mathew develops not only bruises on his body, which mysteriously come and go, but some startling photography. It’s in images he’s taken of the garden where we find Alice’s ghost, standing against the fence and staring at us. June believes Alice is still alive as a result and the body is exhumed. But yep, definitely dead.
The séance
A whole bunch of incredibly creepy in-house VHS video footage follows: Alice is spotted in the hallway; in the mirror in her bedroom. Topping it all off, the family, along with new-found oddball spiritual medium pal Ray (Steve Jodrell), then hold a séance. Deemed a failure at first, it’s only when they rewatch the video footage that something is amiss. The camera pans into the corner of the screen and lingers a little too long on what attentive viewers will have already discovered: Alice’s ghostly presence watching proceedings.
However, creepy plot twist: Mathew has manipulated the photos and videos to make it appear Alice’s ghost has appeared. He says this is to give his mum some closure. But still, bit odd, mate?
That’s not the whole story though, as we learn later.
The neighbours
When Alice’s ghost continues to appear in footage, even though Mathew is away and couldn’t have manipulated it, June goes through the tapes again to see if there was anything she missed.
She finds another face in her home – this time a living terror. The Palmer’s neighbour, Brett Toohey, is seen in Alice’s bedroom.
Brett, we are told, seemed a nice guy who held barbecues for neighbours; but there’s a Lynchian dark heart to this previously quaint community. A safe with is uncovered in the room by June. It contains a video, which shows Brett and his wife – who Alice had babysat for and the Palmers had considered to be friends – engaging in sexual activities with her daughter.
In a movie that’s so supernaturally haunting, it’s a hideously grim hit of reality. Questions are raised that never get answered, even more so as the Tooheys had moved away and cannot be found. How long had this been going on? Why did Alice have the tape? Had feelings been involved? How had Brett managed to get inside the Palmer’s home to look for the tape? Alice kept her secrets, and these stay secrets. And one can only imagine what it would feel like to be her – the burden, loneliness and isolation – to be trapped in that situation.
Alice meets Alice
Grainy footage; spooky night-time vibes; a remote dry lake with spiritual prehistoric connections – all good ingredients for one of movie-makings truly great jump scares. The Palmers seek to explore why, six months before her death, Alice buried her prized possessions under a tree during a trip with friends to the titular Lake Mungo and why she seemed so creeped out afterwards. After locating the spot, uncovering her phone and watching the footage she shot from it, they find out.
Walking towards Alice is a figure, hard to make out at first, coming ever closer, until we see its face in freeze-frame. It’s how Alice appears in the future, in the photo we see of her corpse after her drowning. Meeting her own death.
It’s an image you can’t unsee. And then the figure jumps towards us, an inhuman sound getting us jumping out of our skins.
Alice knows she is going to die. Soon. That opening quote, also played out here over the footage, now makes an awful lot of sense, even if, as June says, there is ‘absolutely no rational explanation’ for what is on that phone.
It’s a shame about Ray
As if the Palmers life hasn’t unravelled enough, it soon transpires that Ray had been in contact with Alice about these troubling visions long before her death, but had kept this fact a secret. The Palmers had trusted him enough to have also gone on a road trip with their teenage son, so this comes as a bit of a shock. Exactly what is Ray’s interest in this family? Again, we never unravel this secret. But we see footage of Ray’s hypnosis sessions with Alice and June, filmed months apart, of the pair describing the same dream, with June failing to find Alice in her bedroom, leaving her all alone.
It’s a desperately sad sequence – the June unable to connect with her daughter, in both life and death.
Here’s what you might have missed
After the phone footage revelations, the Palmers stop seeing Alice’s ghost and feel a sense of closure. It’s now, at the movies’ end, that we learn that the family photo we see at the start is taken on the day they move out of their home. And it’s now the camera zooms in on the face in the window, looking out at them.
It seems that the rest of the Palmers are moving on both figuratively and literally, but Alice hasn’t. And never will – doomed to be trapped, alone, in a time and a place forever. A mystery to those who love her in life and in death. As the credits roll, we see other times that her family have overlooked her presence – including in Mathew’s garden image, where Alice’s true spectre sits in the corner, alone.
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Andrew Brassleay
