Lake Mungo (2008)

Watching Lake Mungo is like watching a TV documentary about a crime that you already know the outcome of. We know Alice drowned and we know she comes back as a ghost, it says so in the tagline. But like most TV documentaries, you'll have your hand held through a ton of details that you'll realize are totally irrelevant in the end. It's basically a dramatic inside look at the stages of grief sprinkled with a bit of supernatural to get the critic's on board. One aspect of Lake Mungo which becomes obvious early on is the footage of the ghost is always super grainy, dark, pixelated, low budget 70's-style footage. Seriously, half the time there's those horizontal lines bouncing around as if we're watching it on an old fashioned TV that you have to adjust vertical alignment on. It's kind of like watching old bigfoot sightings for an hour. But this all supposedly took place in 2005. There's even video from a cell phone with the quality of one of those reel-to-reel projectors. I get it though, grainy dark pixelated distorted video makes ghostly effects easy, inexpensive, and adds enough ambiguity to make the whole ghost sighting thing maybe possible. I get it, but I don't have to like it.