“I runne to death / and all my pleasures are like yesterday”, as John Donne wrote, is the epigram to both Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim and Jesus Franco’s Venus in Furs, and it could well serve just as well for Joel Anderson’s 2008 debut film Lake Mungo. Another entry in the now almost ubiquitous style of the mockumentary, of which I needed to see another variation like I needed to cleave off one of my own opposable digits, Lake Mungo nonetheless proves how much life even an over-used storytelling gimmick can still offer. The film purports to be an account of the inexplicable phenomena that overtook the lives of the Palmer family, residents of the inland Victorian town of Ararat Alice
With the aid of a psychic, Ray Kemeny (Steve Jodrell), they attempted to gain solid evidence of the haunting, and film mysterious visages and figures passing through the house in the dead of night. When much of this evidence proved to have been faked by Mathew, the haunting seemed discredited, but then other, stranger discoveries reshaped the situation. The fact that Alice was engaged in a ménage a trois with a neighbouring couple, the Tooheys (Tamara Donnellan and Scott Terrill), had brought them sneaking into the house at night to search for a pilfered videotape of one of their escapades, and Ray’s own hidden connection to Alice proved a severing ruction between him and the Palmers. But the most disturbing revelations prove to be contained on Alice’s long-lost mobile phone, found buried on the banks of the titular lake, being not where she drowned but a far more distant, foreboding locale Alice visited on a school excursion. What did Alice encounter in the darkness at Lake Mungo
Technically excellent, with great photography by John Brawley, Lake Mungo, in spite of the theoretically dry style that employs a constant procession of interviews and voiceovers, constructs a richly eerie, even poetic evocation of grief, secrecy, and human need for deeper underpinnings to existence conspiring to construct a web of doubt and obscurity. The fakery is studiously achieved, from recreations of faintly stilted regional television news reports, to the effectively naturalistic performances in straightforward interviews. Anderson cunningly stretches the imitation-documentary format just a little, offering time-lapse and seasonally varying shots of the family home and the localities of Ararat, glittering in the sun and rendered ghostly in the rain, the stars rising and falling as if communicating in some unknown code. Such touches seem at first to be imitating the contextualising filler of many documentaries, but finally seem to plug into the swirl of cosmic mystery and the heedless rhythms of nature with an authentically digital-era version of spiritual questing. It would have been a steeper and possibly even more substantial task for Anderson to realise the story in more familiar dramatic terms, but the use of found footage and photography is cleverly concerned not merely with clobbering the audience with the awesome contrivances of the film crew, a la Rec/Quarantine, Cloverfield etc, but exploring the vagueness of technological imagery itself in a fashion more reminiscent of Blow-Up. The way such imagery can be manipulated, the way it can accidentally map truths beyond what even its controllers can’t muster, the way that even the seeming fact of the frame’s contents can offers pools of strangeness into which any fancy might be projected.
Anderson clearly understands the power in those ambiguities, and has obviously at some point familiarised himself with the visual language and creepy beauties of much of the “evidence” from modern supernatural investigations, his visions reminiscent of photographs like those from the Amityville haunting, and video footage clearly evoking the likes of the Patterson Bigfoot film. Yet his understanding is also apparent in simpler gimmicks, like the way Alice’s displays of nascent flirtatious wiles in home movie footage alters meaning as the story proceeds, and casually captured moments gain suddenly charged, reverberating import. The character of psychic Ray, a childhood immigrant from Hungary , intriguingly connects the story with old world traditions of dealing with death (he amusingly styles himself as “Australia Alice Alice
The intrusion of Australian immigrant culture into the always faintly unforgiving continental landscape is a subtext that vibrates, both with seriousness, and also wryness in paying some nods to the ür-text of Aussie spook-fests Picnic at Hanging Rock. One of the interview subjects, Alice Lake Mungo Anderson certainly relishes trying to creep the audience out, and the story builds to a fittingly disquieting revelation of Alice
Fittingly, then, Mathew’s fakery is motivated not by mischief but a desire to synthesise a continuing place for Alice in the daily life of the family, a desire that proved to have contradictory and even retarding results, for he had stoked June’s belief Alice might still be alive to the point where he body was exhumed and tested just to make sure. Mathew theorises that Ray’s own secret-keeping might be an extension of his needing the family as much as they need him, and that argument could be linked to the texture of the film as a whole, characters possibly providing evidence of haunting purely to maintain a desperate link in the face of loss and alienation. Not all of Lake Mungo’s often cryptically parsed information adds up: I’m not sure if the sojourn detailing Alice Anderson Lake Mungo
