Apparitions in Ararat
Recently, I began my latest dive into the darker genres of film and television. A fair amount of horror with sprinklings of tense dramas and crime documentaries. Included in the itinerary were 2021’s Sasquatch and 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow, plus revisitations of classics like 2003’s Memories of Murder.
Sasquatch was a clever bait-and-switch which I did not mind one bit. I suspect people who believe in cryptozoological creatures may feel differently, but I found its central conceit extremely effective. I Saw the TV Glow was a heart-wrenching exploration of identity, expression and acceptance. It is unfortunate that this type of conveyance of the trans experience, in the language of psychological horror, resonates as it does within our current zeitgeist. Memories was as spectacular as the first time I watched it. Not too many films globally reach the cruising altitude of peak Korean cinema.
I would highly recommend all the aforementioned works.
Spelunking into cultural caves often neglected by the mainstream also brought me to revisit another classic: 2008’s Lake Mungo. Part of a solid and growing output of Australian horror in the twenty-first century, alongside the likes of The Babadook (2014), Relic (2020), and Talk to Me (2022).
Mungo is strange because since its release, critics and audiences have given it widely disparate reviews. They have labeled it as “one of the scariest films ever made” and “a masterpiece” as often as mentioning it as “nothing unique” or “boring”. It is the kind of reputation that helps a movie develop cult status and invites in budding cinephiles as the years pass by. One’s experience of any piece of art will be tempered by taste, and Mungo may on the surface seem quite a polarizing creation: a low-budget pseudo-documentary ghost story. Perhaps not screaming “revolutionary” or “special”.
Allow me to relay my thoughts. I love this film. And to those who have never given horror a try or despise scary flicks, I would suggest this as a gem not be overlooked. Frankly, an ideal introduction to an oft-dismissed genre. Its scares are well-placed, telegraphed and layered. It is horror of the highest order – where fear and sadness are intertwined with hope and elation to produce a more meaningful narrative.
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When you watch enough of a certain genre, you begin to discern its defining patterns. The cinematographic signatures: underlying color palettes and their tie to certain emotions, or the lighting and textures emphasized in repeated shots to manipulate subsequent readings. The scores and sounds that are paired with characters, settings, or events, and their matching or mismatching with plot peaks and troughs. The rhyming conversations and story beats. Character development based on real, grounded interactions rather than the trope-filled norms of blockbuster entertainment. In briefer terms, you begin to understand a film’s poetry and how its stanzas compare to its contemporaries.
Lake Mungo is an example of the slow-burn horror perfectly executed. What makes it stand out is the thoughtful construction of all the above throughout the film’s lean runtime (88 minutes). Not once does the story feel contrived or forced. The performances, soundtrack, framing, editing, and dialogue all clinical and in harmony.
Horror is most penetrative, this viewer shall argue, when it deals with the intimate. The previously mentioned I Saw the TV Glow and its lamentations is a great example. Or 2018’s Hereditary, centered on fracturing familial bonds. Mungo’s nucleus is also comprised of a dysfunctional family and the processing of grief. The story centers on the Palmers: children Alice and Matthew, and their parents Russell and June. Alice has recently drowned during a family day trip, something that her parents and brother attempt to come to terms with throughout the film. Friends and acquaintances of the Palmers feature regularly, providing insights into their family unit, relationships within social circles, and reactions to the tragedy of Alice’s passing. Finally, there is Ray, a psychic who is known to June through his popular radio program and eventually employed by the Palmers to conduct seances in their home.
Mungo is a collection of chronological interviews stitched together, overlaid with images and scenes from different points in time. You could be forgiven for believing it is a real documentary. The performances, particularly from the actors playing Russell and June, appear genuine. Joel Anderson, the movie’s writer and director (and uncredited behind-the-camera interviewer), ensured the dialogue appeared natural by providing the cast with only an outline of each scene. Their resulting improvisations, whether being interviewed alone or as a family, result in an organic character development that imbues the film with a sense of authenticity. The movie’s graininess, the result of budget and tech limitations, is artfully suited to the time it is purported to be made.
Spoilers ahead.
We follow along as Russell, June and Matthew deal with Alice’s death and the following tumult in their lives. Matthew sees Alice’s ghost in photographs he takes around their house. She is also seen in videos taken by family friends near the site of her drowning. An eerie presence is felt in the Palmer home in Ararat, as Russell and June both having visions of their deceased daughter. Matthew sets up video cameras around the house and captures Alice’s visage multiple times. Ray is brought in to bridge a connection between the spirit and her family, to no avail.
Against this backdrop, we see how the Palmers’ bonds are tested – with each other, their colleagues, their neighbors and their community – as they learn more about the departed Alice’s hidden depression. The hidden aspects of her life, as they are slowly revealed, begin to clarify things never shared by the family in interviews, such as their emotional dysfunction and disconnection from each other.
Alice’s secrets were many. We learn that her friends feel like they “barely knew her” and that she “kept to herself”. She was always annoyed and at times furious with her brother for not respecting her privacy. She always felt disconnected from her mother, never comfortable in being herself with her. She has dreams of seeing her parents and feeling like she is invisible to them. This leaves her in a state where she has “never been more alone”. Despite being in a committed relationship and being a minor, Alice is also involved in an affair with the couple next door.
A few of these revelations are exposed in video clips that Ray recorded of his sessions with Alice, a connection he keeps confidential until it is found out by the Palmers through discovery of Alice’s personal diary. In addition, Russell and June unearth a video of Alice having sex with the neighbors, who we are told left soon after her death. Ray is barred from the Palmer household and his motives questioned.
As the family attempts to reconcile with Alice’s spirit in some meaningful way, holding onto hope for closure, we are dealt complicating details. Matthew, it turns out, fabricated the photos and videos showing Alice’s ghost. He used his photography skills to manipulate individual frames of film, implanting stills of Alice from old home videos into backgrounds of his captured footage around the house. Matthew is also shown to be Alice’s doppelganger in videos taken by family friends, due to dawning her jacket and walking around the lake where she died. Something he avoids confessing to so that his parents can hold onto some hope that she is still around.
We know from the opening scenes of the film that Matthew was the last to see his sister alive. Following her death, he is found to have bruises all over his body which soon heal. This unresolved note and his often-contentious relationship with his sister has left some viewers with the suspicion that he drowned his sister. The other interpretation is that he is a young, idiosyncratic kid who is navigating the loss of his sibling by acting out through his limited passions.
In the third act, the Palmers learn that some of Alice’s belongings are hidden at Lake Mungo, buried at the site of her last school field trip. They drive out to uncover the final piece of the puzzle of Alice’s mysterious behavior in the weeks before her death. Though they find some closure and believe the story concluded, the film has more secrets to reveal.
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Lake Mungo’s plot is layered. We have the processing of a family’s grief over a two-year span, poltergeist tails and the interventions of a medium, familial trauma, hoaxing, and of course, the examined presence of a spirit in life and death.
It also shows how challenging circumstances can be negotiated in unique ways. ‘Grief’ is not some monster to be overcome and ‘closure’ is hardly a finish line. The domestic unit stays together but approaches their personal struggles with loss so differently. Matthew wears Alice’s clothes and delves into family photos and videos in a vain search for nostalgia. His manipulation of memory via hoaxing is a cry for greater connection with his living parents, not his dead sister. June seeks to build a relationship with her daughter after her death, when it is too late. Her attempts eventually bring her closer to her husband and son. And Russell, who is the only one to see Alice’s body after its recovery, busies himself with distractions rather than engaging with the meaning of his daughter’s death. He eventually leads his family into a new home and removes them from a place that is repeatedly traumatizing, adopting a protective stance towards his wife and son.
It must be mentioned that all three disagree with their interpretations of events, from Alice’s appearance in their home to the episode at Lake Mungo. Despite this and their long-term reactions to the spookiness around them, they learn to hold each other closer.
I talked earlier about identifying patterns in genre features. Mungo has some of the best rhyming poetry of any horror film I have ever seen. The parallels between Ray’s conversations with June at the beginning of the runtime and with Alice at the end are beautifully constructed. Both daughter and mother repeat identical visions from mirroring vantage points, sharing how they dream of walking towards each other in their home but are never able to connect. June and Alice express the exact same anxieties to Ray; their ability to open up to a strange psychic so much greater than to each other, a psychic who cannot himself connect the dots to bring them together. Russell and June’s interviews seem to cross-pollinate and reverse in perspective at times throughout the film, both parents wrestling with what is true and challenging themselves to understand their daughter’s ghost from a new lens. The understated way in which the actors sell their emotions is fabulous.
Or what of the Palmers’ car stalling as they head back from their lake outing and need to reverse the whole way into town? Just as Alice dies before her mom and grandmom, which the latter opines is “not the natural order of things”. A mirror to the reverse chronological order in which many of Alice’s secrets are revealed, from her affair to her encounter at the lake.
One of my favorite set of rhyming scenes is delivered by Russell and Matthew. Russell describes walking into his daughter’s room, and staring at her ghost scribbling notes into her diary. She does not initially notice him, but when she does, she screams at him to leave. Later, we see a video that Matthew has taken, showing him sneaking into Alice’s room as she has her head down, writing in her diary. When she looks up, she yells at him to leave, a replay of Russell’s vision. Quietly and sometimes less obviously, scenes like this echo throughout the film, underscoring the domestic troubles within the Palmer household.
But the theme of hope amongst sadness also resonates. Matthew’s attempts at conjuring hope for his parents that their daughter is still reachable as he carries out his forgeries, or Russell and June holding onto potential reconciliation with a lost child through seances. A tainted hope is likewise present: Ray’s professional dependence on the Palmers’ belief in spiritual dimensions.
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Even the best pseudo-documentaries usually include some off-kilter notes. Take 2009’s District 9 and its use of comedic, hyperbolic elements. Mungo is the antithesis of this norm, playing it straight the entire way. It is convincing enough that even disbelievers in the supernatural (like yours truly) remain rapt.
It builds a constantly growing state of dread without needing to rely on releases through jump scares. The scariest parts of the film are hardly the appearances of spirits, fake or otherwise. Rather, it is the slow breaking of family ties, depression’s infuriating manifestations, the uneasiness between siblings with atypical personalities, and guilt that cannot be outrun. The apparitions of Ararat are more than just ghosts in the closet.
Image credits: SBS Independent/ Screen Australia/ Mungo Productions
Postscript: Joel Anderson has been involved with only one other feature film since writing and directing Lake Mungo: 2023’s Late Night with the Devil. A much more conventionally scary horror that is nonetheless worth the genre nerd’s gaze.