Friday, January 29, 2010

Lake Mungo



3/5

Lake Mungo is an Australian film which goes for the documentary style, telling the story about a young girl who while out with her family goes missing and suspected to have drowned. Her family recounts the events leading up to her disappearance and what happens after her body was recovered. This film is played out by 'home made footage', 'news footage', 're-enactments' and 'interviews' and it tries to show how the family deals with their grief and how the supernatural plays apart in it all as they try to understand what happened to Alice and what secrets she may have been keeping.

It is hard to really go into more detail without completely spoiling the film, the less you know the better it is. The actual home footage and interviews are really well done and quite convincing. I thought the actors for the most part did a stand up job. The news footage looked authentic which really added to the style and I think the only low point is some of the supernatural stuff was a bit hard to understand and see. The twists and reveals sometimes felt out of place and didn't make much sense at first. They establish Alice had secrets, and some were rather startling but in some ways it added nothing to the story.

This film I would say is not so much horror as it is a film about grieving with a supernatural twist. It is a rather sad film, as I cannot imagine what it would be like to be a parent losing a child (in this case a teenager) in the way that Alice was lost. The things they find out and of course a revelation at Lake Mungo which is actually rather creepy and disturbing. Things like this really sit you hard, however there was so much potential to do more here and it falls flat. At times the film can be a bit slow and it isn't until the second half it feels like the pace improves and it really grabs your interest.

It is hard to tell what the film makers wanted to say here, but none the less it did make for a somewhat interesting film and something a bit different from this country. The positives with this film certainly out-weigh the negative and it is actually a well put together film a side from pacing issues in the first half. They wanted to establish the family and what had happened but some scenes could have been left out to tighten up the pace. This was a pretty good effort and I liked the film for what it was.

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