While watching this, we had the vague impression that we’ve already seen this before yet couldn’t be sure. Since I now have a record of every film I’ve watched, I could check and see that it wasn’t the case. It’s just how the film makes use of the usual techniques of the horror genre that makes it seem so familiar. This is a supremely creepy, suspenseful film and it represents perhaps the very epitome of what can be achieved with this style. Yet it also illustrates their limits as it’s all pure atmosphere and the film doesn’t really go anywhere at the end.

The film is presented as a documentary about the Palmer family and consists of interviews of family members and other people who know about the case. This begins with their daughter, 16-year-old Alice, who drowns while on a family trip to Lake Mungo. Over the following weeks however the family becomes convinced that her ghost is haunting the house due to strange noises coming from Alice’s room. Her brother Matthew sets up video cameras around the house and indeed captures blurry images that seem to look like Alice. They even exhume the buried corpse to perform a DNA test in case it is another girl but the test comes back positive. Meanwhile the mother seeks the assistance of a psychic Ray Kemeny to come to terms to her grief. Even as they struggle to find conclusive evidence of something supernatural going on, they do learn that Alice kept secrets from them and even from her friends as there are parts of her life that none of them were aware of. Plus they discover that Alice isn’t the only one keeping secrets.

I don’t want to give away any key spoilers as they’re critical to enjoying this film yet I will say that it isn’t really about the plot twists. I’ve long maintained in this blog that minimizing the overtly supernatural elements and focusing on subtle effects is far more effective at terrorizing the audience and this film makes for a superb example of this approach. It works hard to keep the audience on the very edge of doubt, wondering if all of the weirdness has a mundane explanation or if Alice’s ghost is really there. It ratchets up the tension only to offer a release valve to relax the audience only to ratchet it up again with another revelation. This method also resonates well with the underlying theme of that we rarely know people as well as we think we do and different people may know different sides of the same person. As the family tries to get to the truth of what happened, they feel that they are getting to know her more and this is meant to provide catharsis to them.

I will note that in constructing this specific narrative, director Joel Anderson leaves the seams visible. The film relies on a steady drip-feed of revelations which leads the mother June to look for secrets in Alice’s diary months after her death even though this should be one of the first things she checks. The reveal of Ray’s own secret is another example as there is no real reason why it even needs to be a secret and it doesn’t affect the mystery of Alice’s death in any way. The desire to tease the possibility of the supernatural is also at odds with it being a serious drama about the family members really getting to know Alice after her death. Note how there is no follow up in searching for the neighbors when the family learns that Alice had a secret relationship with them. Make no mistake, I do find this to be a creative, smart way to add some weight to a supernatural story but as I’d said, the approach has inherent limits as underneath the theme, this is still a film that is trying to scare you.

Most horror films aren’t really scary to me at all as they’re usually just another monster-of-the-week so it’s already quite an achievement that I found this one to be genuinely creepy and scary. I strongly recommend this to anyone who would enjoy being actually scared by a horror film. Still the more critical part of me sees that it achieves this by repeatedly using the familiar trick of hiding a blurry, ghostly image in photographs and videos while only engaging very shallowly on the question of who Alice really was. It is an excellent horror film but it’s also trapped by the constraints of its genre.