"Lake Mungo"

Lake Mungo is one of many people's favourite "horror" films of the twenty first century, including me, but I've noticed that a lot of online commenters on it have missed the point. In this 2008 mockumentary, Australian teenager Alice Palmer drowns while swimming in a dam in her hometown of Ararat, Victoria. Later, her surviving family members notice inexplicable goings-on in their home, and son Matthew, Alice's brother, sets up video cameras around the house to try to find evidence of paranormal happenings. He does, but these turn out to have been faked by him in a misguided attempt to bring comfort to his grieving mother June. June, examining the doctored footage, discovers that the recordings had in truth observed an intruder having broken into their home, leading to the revelation that Alice had a secret life, being engaged in a hidden relationship with the couple next door. This leads to the recovery of a diary indicating that something strange happened when Alice went on a school trip to Lake Mungo in outback New South Wales. The Palmers find Alice's buried phone out on the dry lakebed, on which a video records an uncanny and disturbing encounter Alice had in the months before she died: an encounter with her own doppelganger, an apparition resembling her own drowned corpse from her forthcoming death. Upon returning to Ararat, the family feels that Alice's presence is now gone from the house, and they decide to get a fresh start by selling up and moving away. In the end, however, we see that while the Palmers have gone, Alice is still there, standing in the front window, watching her family leave her behind.

I've seen many commenters on this film online interpret the film as having an ultimately positive, if sad, ending, perhaps a bittersweet one. The Palmers go through the ups and downs of grief, such as denial and bargaining, but in the end they get closure and let Alice go so that they themselves can move on. But Lake Mungo isn't about that at all; in fact, that's almost the opposite of what it's about. The film doesn't have a remotely positive ending. The Palmers don't resolve their grief through healthy acceptance, but rather through projection and blame. Alice's greatest fear in the months before her death was the feeling that there was nothing her parents could do for her, that they didn't understand her and couldn't help, and so when they leave she's abandoned, stuck haunting her old house, perhaps forever.

Much of this seems a commentary on repression. The Palmers are a classic Anglo-Australian suburban family: mum, dad and two kids. We don't really see it on screen, but we learn that June and Alice had an uneasy relationship; it was hard for them to open up to one another. The same was true for June and her mother Iris, and Iris tells us that it was much the same between herself and her mother. But it's not just the women of the family who seem to struggle with sharing their feelings with others; Russell, the father, throws himself into his work, and Matthew, the son, uses music, photography, wearing his sister's jacket, faking her ghost, all sorts of things to try to cope with her death. One of the things we virtually never see is any of them talking to each other about her. It's true of Alice herself; she had family, friends and a boyfriend, but pursued a secret relationship with a married couple presumably because she couldn't find much in the way of intimacy in her own life. This isn't to say that what the neighbours, the Tooheys, did wasn't wrong, because ethically it probably was (if not legally), but the fact was that Alice was trying to find something she wasn't getting in her "normal" life.

Throughout the film, the characters often seem either unwilling or unable to wholly express their grief, relying on the Australian tradition, inherited from the British, of keeping a stiff upper lip; Russell is particularly indicative of this, the constant small brave smile on his lips suggestive of a man who couldn't possibly express his real feelings. Matthew, who is often wide-eyed and hesitant, seems lost, while June alternates between speaking baldly about behaviour such as entering people's houses, before breaking into demure, restrained tears. One performance that really stood out to be on a recent viewing is that of the actor who plays Jason, Alice's boyfriend, who always has a sardonic smile on his face; we of course eventually find out that he now knows that she was cheating on him with the neighbours, and it seems that he struggles to contain his bitterness.

The reason these performances are all so effective is because not only do they plausibly recreate what a real interview subject might say and do, but because they represent the discomfort of middle-class Anglo-Australians with their own feelings and emotions. The Palmers need anything they can to deal with the grief of losing Alice because heaven forfend they actually cry or wail or hold each other. There must, they think, be some other way.

Alice isn't haunting her family because she's trying to give them closure. She's not trying to lead them to Lake Mungo so that they can discover the truth and allow her, and themselves, to move on. As we see after the credits, she's still there at Lake Mungo, standing eternal vigil over the place where she came face to face with her own mortality. What she's trying to do is to reach out, to be noticed or heard, the way she never was when she was alive. But her parents and her brother don't notice. When both Alice and June have their final sessions with Ray the psychic, sessions that happen years apart but also at the same time, Alice can see her mother and wants her attention, but June doesn't see her daughter. She may be blind to Alice's presence, but Alice is still there.

The film is constructed so that we see Alice's story the same way her family saw it: with them in the middle and her on the periphery. But Alice was always there; we just didn't notice her, because that was what her life was like: there were things that were happening to her and things she was feeling, but she couldn't tell anyone, at least not the people to whom she was supposedly closest. For perhaps none of us really know each other, for what is it to "know" someone but to create an image of them based on what our own perceptions tell us? We can never really know what is going on inside anyone else's head. You can only ever hope that maybe the words you're reading right now have the same meaning to you as they did when I was writing them. What is it to grieve except to do what your body tells you to do until the pain of another person's permanent absence no longer preoccupies you? And what is it to die but to become a memory of who other people thought you were, that only lasts until anyone who knew you forgets, or is gone themselves?

So that's Lake Mungo. It's not sad because Alice's family struggled with losing her. It's sad because they didn't really know or understand her when she was still alive, and they never really will. Those ghosts we see in the photo are, both literally and figuratively, the projection of her own feelings of helplessness and distance, both from the past and within her own mind. And that is the film, and film in general, itself: a projection of things we can merely perceive and pretend are real until they're over.

Annabelle: Creation

I liked The Conjuring, and I mostly like The Conjuring 2. While their jump scares are a bit predictable, they generally create a good, spooky, disturbing atmosphere mixed with entertaining ghost-hunting pseudoscience (and pseudotech), and the two leads are very watchable and likeable. The Annabelle spinoff/prequel was complete schlock crap, but I didn't expect it to be anything else, and regardless, well, let's just say I didn't exactly spend a great deal of money to watch it, if you catch my drift. I wasn't exactly taken with the idea of another film, a prequel to the prequel, but when I heard it was getting decent reviews, I thought "Why not?"

Annabelle: Creation feels like a few things. Firstly it feels like a film which, way back at some point in the development process, was meant to subvert some of the recurring elements of the Conjuring franchise and some clichés of modern horror films. The reason I say "way back", however, is because it also feels like a film which was rewritten by a Hollywood hack at some point. It thirdly feels, with two overt links to other films, one already made and one forthcoming, as another desperate attempt on the part of Warner Bros. to establish a "cinematic universe" surrounding, I suppose, the demons featured in the Conjuring films.

The ever-credible Wikipedia informs me that director David F. Sandberg, filmmaker of Lights Out, took a less meticulously-storyboarded approach to this film, instead opting for a "figure it out on the set" one. I believe this is PR speak for "Warner Bros. and New Line didn't give me enough time and money to make this properly." This shows, as while Lights Out is hardly a masterpiece, it perhaps still has threads of Sandberg's YouTube viral-video auteurship in it, while Annabelle: Creation simply feels botched, like the half-made dolls in the eponymous character's father's workshop.

Annabelle: Creation's strongest moments almost entirely occur in its first half, seemingly before the scripting or editing process, or both, collapsed. While the premise of a group of vulnerable girls and resident nun being sent to live in a somewhat spooky house out in the country is hardly original, the film appears to be possibly doing something vaguely interesting with Janice and Linda, two orphans hoping to become "real sisters" if they are adopted by the same couple. This follows a fairly engrossing prologue in which the titular Annabelle, innocent originator of the notes the doll would come to drop, is abruptly hit by a car.

The problem is that this feeling of engagement starts to fall apart when Janice, predictably, makes not one but repeated trips to the dead girl's bedroom, almost as if she's a robot programmed to seek out horror scenes. You'd think after having one spooky experience in there, as well as finding the creepy doll, she'd tell that bedroom where to shove it, forcing the demon to get a bit more creative, but that doesn't happen, and virtually the rest of the film becomes a series of endless lead-ups to Janice or, later, Linda, making sojourns to the late Annabelle's bedroom just to get spooked again. I was finding the film reasonably enjoyable up until the point at which, on Janice's second or third trip to the room, she witnesses what appears to be an apparition of the dead girl. However, as we later discover, it's just a demon pretending, and when Janice asks what she wants, she abruptly turns around, adopts the yellow-eyed fanged horror face that every Conjuring demon has, and proclaims "Your soul!" I was staggered at how unbelievably stock, generic and cliché this moment was, especially in contrast to promise shown to that point, and from this moment the film started to fail.

In this regard the film is infected with innumerable clichés once it loses its drive, especially ones which make the Conjuring franchise as a whole seem repetitive and stale: demons levitating people, demons telekinetically throwing furniture around, the ancient trick of flickering lightbulbs and of course, a more modern favourite, fleeing people being tripped and dragged by the ankles back the way they came by an unseen force. The glimpses we get of the demon itself show something appallingly generic, just a charcoal-skinned hornéd beastie let loose from a medieval woodcut. Janice also gets trapped, frightened and subsequently possessed in a manner highly reminiscent of the original Paranormal Activity film, especially once she starts pretending she's fine when she obviously isn't. The barrage of these desperately unimaginative moments makes the film predictable and, as a result, boring, surely the worst sin a horror film can commit.

What makes this so exasperating is that the film itself has some strong elements. As was the case with The Conjuring films, it gives a decent share of screen time to a relatively large cast of relatively talented young actors; Janice and Linda are particularly well cast, and their performances when they're still trying to figure out their situation are fairly believable and likeable. The biggest problem is when Janice is forced into the boring, routine "possession" role which basically just means she becomes a child-sized knife slasher with a creepy head tilt and waxy makeup. There is, however, some effective use of humour, particularly derived from Linda's behaviour: her willingness to leave Janice inside so she can go enjoy herself when Janice says she's fine, her quick departure to avoid chores in the schoolroom and, best of all, the cut from her declining to enter Annabelle's room (perhaps the only time anyone makes this sensible choice) to a shot of her guarding her own bedroom door against the fiend with a popgun she acquired earlier.

Yet none of this can compensate for what is perhaps the film's biggest failing, a huge problem with pacing and structure, which coalesces with the bombardment of horror clichés to make the viewing experience of the last half-hour or so of the film tedious to the point of absurdity. Miranda Otto, out for a quick buck, is forced to deliver an extremely clunky exposition-dump immediately prior to her character being killed off, revealing the origin of the demon in their home in a way that was partially obvious or could have been guessed and partially could have been teased out through more gradual storytelling. This hurls what should be the start of the film's climax into a series of flashbacks. Furthermore, the film ends with an entirely unnecessary epilogue linking this film's events directly and explicitly to that of the previous Annabelle film, as if anyone cared or remembered, assuming they'd seen it at all. Footage is reused from early in that film to anticlimactically end this one. I also believe that this involves some torturous storytelling, as the original film simply said the doll was used by a demon after a cult ritual involving Annabelle, the neighbours' wayward daughter. Now "Annabelle" is actually a demon pretending to be a dead girl named Annabelle who possesses Janice who then calls herself Annabelle who is adopted by the neighbours in the first film and grows up to be the cultist, who then I think somehow puts the demon back into the doll, as if it would want to go back into the doll. Good grief.

The most egregious element, however, is a brief scene shoehorned into the first act (or so) of the film in which Sister Charlotte, the girls' guardian, shows Annabelle's father a photograph of herself with some other nuns, one of which is actually Valak, the demon from The Conjuring 2. This is obviously done not just as a reference but as a piece of promotion for 2018's upcoming "The Nun" film about the character, as the scene bears no other real relevance to the plot or characterisation of this film. It's clearly another pathetic attempt to rip off Disney/Marvel's successful, yet increasingly bland and soulless, "cinematic universe" method, as Warner Bros. already tried (and presumably has failed) to do with King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Universal is apparently attempting with its dare-I-dignify-it-by-naming-it "Dark Universe" franchise. By this stage it is so transparent that all it accomplishes is making the surrounding film less immersive and damaging further any possibility of suspending disbelief. This is exacerbated by a moment in the epilogue when Janice-possessed-by-the-Annabelle-demon is given a Raggedy Ann doll, which is what the "real" Annabelle doll is. The wink to the know-alls (like me) in the audience is just distracting, and it only leaves me thinking that using a Raggedy Ann doll would actually have been a lot creepier, if done well, than the overdesigned doll of the films, which I can't imagine anyone from even the most twisted era of American nursery culture not finding grotesque.

Fair play to David F. Sandberg for making the transition from YouTube to Hollywood; his wife Lotta Losten, star of the original Lights Out short, makes a cameo in this, but unfortunately in the risible and exhausting epilogue sequence. That doesn't change the fact, however, that Annabelle: Creation is a film I shouldn't have allowed to disappoint me. Maybe someone who really cares could make a worthy fan edit of this, eliminating CGI demon-faces, multiple trips to Annabelle's bedroom, the epilogue and perhaps a sequence in which Linda, having laboriously descended the house in the dumbwaiter, then decides to make the entire journey to the top again in real time. The fact is, if more people had given a shit, this could have genuinely been a standout piece of franchise horror-schlock. It might, for instance, have used its premise to consider in some depth the crises of faith and hope of orphans and people in similar situations of limited emotional support. It might have used Janice and Linda's friendship to put a different spin on the 'lone girl getting menaced in a spooky room' concept. It could even have gone down more of a comedy route, mixing chills with gags for an experiment with a sine-wave of mood. It doesn't, however, yet people are still offering it praise. I simply don't understand why. To my mind, this is for Conjuring franchise completionists only, if indeed it's for anyone at all.