We heard about Lake Mungo (2008) on the Movies That Made Me podcast. Director Issa Lopez mentioned it as a great but super-low budget mockumentary horror. Pretty much sums it up.
It's the story of an Australian family with two teen-aged children. One day, on an outing to a lake (not the titular), the girl disappears. They search but don't find her. The story is all told in photographs, interviews, voice over, and family videos.
When they find the body, the wife can't stand to look at it, and maybe doesn't get the closure she needs. She starts to wonder if her daughter may have survived somehow. They also have started hearing noises from her empty room. The son, a photographer notices a figure in the shadows in some of his photos - could it be her? Her ghost?
I won't give away any spoilers, but I will give away the "trick" - this movie uses the technique of showing you a scene or photo, then showing you something in the shadows that you didn't notice. Something spooky.
The movie takes the family through twist after twist, as the supernatural is explained, then comes back, is explained again, and so on. The acting is naturalistic, and (I understand from wikipedia) mostly improvised. Director Joel Anderson made it under severe budget constraints, but by using the documentary frame, it doesn't really show. What shows is the intensity of the feelings of the family who had lost a member.
But what also shows is the aimlessness of the script. At least two amazing revelations are just sort of let to lie there, with no real attempt to deal with them. Maybe that's just how life is, but I'm not sure it helps this movie. In the end, this was just OK as a ghost story.
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