Review:
Lake Mungo is a horror faux-documentary that does a great job with feeling like a legitimate documentary but not so great with feeling like a horror movie. If it wasn't about ghosts, you could easily have convinced me that Lake Mungo was an actual situation being covered in a real documentary. The acting is perfect and they filmed it like the best Planet Earth crew they could find. For a movie made with a minuscule budget for an Australian film festival by a guy with no real movie experience, Lake Mungo is very impressive. My issue is that for a film that is almost and hour and a half, very little happens and we follow too many unimportant plot lines that take away from the real meat of the film. It works to create an atmosphere of unease, but I never felt it accomplished anything as a "horror" movie. I appreciate that it doesn't use jump scares and tries to actually build a scary aura, but it doesn't do enough to create that aura. Lake Mungo is a great film by technical standards, but misses the mark as a horror movie.
