"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 known 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.