Persistent vision: Lake Mungo (2008).

"I am the victim
Of a persistent vision
It tracks me down

With its precision."

- Rites of Spring

Lake Mungo is destined to end up forlorn and forgotten, ghettoized in horror DVD sections and abandoned in clearance bins. Whether it's the schlocky DVD art (compare that silly design to this understated poster for the film) or its retail identity as part of the direct-to-DVD After Dark Horrorfest series, it's not hard to picture the casual viewer dismissing this humble little ghost story and moving on.

That would be a huge mistake, because Lake Mungo is one of the best ghost movies of the past 20 years. It has a purity and realism that makes Paranormal Activity and its ilk seem stagey, an emotional resonance that makes The Ring and Ju-on feel colder and more remote than ever, and a "twist" that's orders of magnitude beyond those found in The Sixth Sense or The Orphanage. And as much as it is a brilliant horror movie, it's also a devastating, human drama about loss, secrecy, and grief. It refuses to fall back on stale cliches, not trying to make you jump so much as trying to draw you in. It's the kind of film that you'll still be turning over in your head long after the credits roll.

Lake Mungo bears a significant David Lynch influence, but maybe not quite in the way you'd expect. This is, after all, a movie about a girl named Laura Alice Palmer who died under mysterious circumstances—but it's a film that seems to take influence less from the style and aesthetic that Lynch is beloved for than from his perennial fascination with dark secrets buried under the facade of normality. Skeptical viewers should know that Lake Mungo is also a film with a drum-tight story to tell, and little interest in surreal digressions. 

It seems like a bit of a red flag when the star goes to the premiere hoping to "learn more" about the film.

Like Twin Peaks in the beginning, Lake Mungo is essentially a mystery: who killed Alice Palmer? The film deserves credit for not structuring the entire movie around the twist, because Lake Mungo would work even without the shocking reveal in the third act. (As with most movies, it's one that's really best to see without any prior knowledge; you've probably read too much already!) So many movies ask you to withhold all questions until the end, putting up with an unbelievable quantity of bullshit in the hopes that the Big Twist will redeem everything—and it so often doesn't. But Lake Mungo is a patient, logical story that will already have you in rapt attention by the time it reaches the moment of revelation, and the surprise it has in store is of an entirely different species than most now making the rounds at the multiplex.

Lake Mungo actually owes less to the typical ghost movie or to David Lynch than it does to a film like Capturing the Friedmans: it's cut to look like a documentary about a family in crisis, and it's extremely convincing. It's actually much more believable than something like 2010's controversial Catfish, a purportedly genuine documentary that presents like a glossy fake. I'd love to show Lake Mungo to someone and tell them it is a real documentary, just to see how they respond. The brilliant editing is one of the film's greatest strengths, because it makes the low-key supernatural proceedings seem that much more authentic—and by extension, that much scarier.

In the post-Paranormal Activity era, we've got more ghost movies than ever to choose from, but what sets Lake Mungo apart is that it's genuinely haunting. Lake Mungo never comes within kilometers of a "cheap" scare, instead emphasizing deep chills and existential dread; there's no cats jumping out of cupboards, no orchestras shoved down the stairs. It's a film less interested in bludgeoning you with the paranormal than nudging you, gently but inexorably, toward an encounter with something that's beyond comprehension. This sense is mirrored by a camera that frequently emulates real-life "spirit photography", showing us a seemingly innocuous shot before slowly and steadily zooming in, Ken Burns style, to reveal the apparent presence of the otherworldly.

Director Joel Anderson nonetheless opted not to adopt Burns' trademark "Lego man" hairstyle.

Late in the film, we see a sequence where two separate sessions with the same psychic (one with central victim Alice Palmer, and one with her mother after her death) are cut together to make it appear as if they're interacting on a plane beyond our understanding. When you stop and think about it, this scene is kind of remarkable: the filmmakers are producing an uncanny effect in us by employing a technique that might be employed by real documentarians to produce the same effect when making a real documentary. At this point, we realize that Lake Mungo is less a horror movie with documentary trappings than an actual documentary about a fictional event.

The scene also encapsulates the film's theme of how the loss of a loved one can make them seem more present in our lives than ever, with our existence rearranged around the fact of their absence. 21st century viewers are so fluent in genre tropes, especially in horror, that movies reflexively commenting on them are now more common that those that treat them with a straight face. (Perhaps you've seen The Cabin in the Woods.) Such self-awareness can be great, especially when it allows a story's inherent unreality to express a basic truth about the way we live: Ringu and its successors spoke to our alienation in a world mediated by technology, while Buffy the Vampire Slayer used ghouls and goblins as metaphors for the painful process of growing up.

Battling the forces of evil, i.e. getting a job where you have to interact with the public.

But Lake Mungo is different, because it's really about us. The characters in the movie feel like real people coping with a real tragedy: not brutal mayhem wrought by a psycho killer, but the tragedy of losing someone in the prime of their life. The psychic in the movie isn't portrayed as the usual mystical seer, confirming the presence of dark forces; instead we get a painfully normal man who is in all likelihood a duplicitous fraud. Even the film's supernatural core is not without ambiguity: nothing in the film is immune to alternative explanation, and the story plays out with a sense of restraint and subtlety that makes the flaming Ouija board scene in Paranormal Activity feel like something out of Transformers.

Naturally, some people will hate it. Some horror fans will probably hate it. But, if you're comfortable with subtlety and ambiguity—and if you don't see the latter as a license to dispense with a good story—you're not likely to find a better ghost story these days.