Dir. Joel Anderson
Told as a documentary,
Lake Mungo is the story of the
disappearance of a sixteen year old girl named Alice, her family coping badly
with her loss but, over the next two years, dealing with the possibility that
her ghost haunts their home and certain other areas. Using the tropes of the
stereotypical documentary found on television - talking head interviews, establishing
footage, archival material from the hauntings and slowly discovered events -
the story peels away the layers until the truth about Alice' life and her last
days alive are revealed. It sounds very interesting. The film reaches something
of immense interest when there is more to the story than a mere haunting, the contradictions
of a family where members don't reveal things to the others, expectations are
not met and new discoveries are found, including an almost mythological or
Edgar Allen Poe-like conclusion to the
story. But there is a fatal flaw. It may be only a personal one for me as a
viewer, but it's a major aesthetics issue that ruins the film. The documentary
structure itself.
It looks like a lot of documentaries
made nowadays on purpose, on cinema screens as well as TV, which is worth
praising for accuracy, but this is a bad mistake in terms of cinematic style
for Lake Mungo as it continues a
side of filmmaking I hate for its laziness. Now if the film had manipulated and
scrutinised the style, this would have helped the film immensely, but aside from
actual documentaries on cinema itself, which feel more like moving resource
books, it is completely insipid for me as a style that has been repeated ad
nauseum. Creating it for verisimilitude in this fake documentary was not a good
idea. Filmmaker Peter Watkins dubbed
this kind of presentation - in editing, use of music, number of shots - the Monoform, a basic structure of
audio-media composition repeated continually in most works, a barrage of audio
and visuals. It's used in documentaries, sports coverage, the news, many
places. Replicated in countless documentaries from talking heads and musical
scores that make you feel emotions from the beginning of the work instead gain
them yourself, Lake Mungo as a fake
documentary replicates it all without ever questioning it in context of its
story. For me, you have no time even contemplate anything in the film, no time
to think to bring it altogether for yourself, as narration immediately goes
into the next interview, no time to illicit emotions of your own because the
film's score tries to force you into how it feels you should at that moment. In
replicating the real examples of this filmmaking, Lake Mungo becomes a tedious work, where a potentially disturbing
and emotionally affecting story is transformed into the kind of supernatural
documentary on television that trivialises concepts of death and trauma for
cheap emotional pull. Pandering to our desires to feel sadness for others'
plights without caring for them once the show ends, not even as fictional
characters in a good drama. It's a
potentially meaningful ghost story turned into a trivial piece of (fictitious)
tragedy porn, straight jacketed into the format it has. Again, it could have
played with the format, especially as this happens in the film with the
haunting footage itself, while other films have television formats and made
great use of them, but barring the story idea surrounding the titular lake, you
are being forced to watch a replication of documentaries with rarely any real
soul to them and tiring for me to see.
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