This is a movie review... I will not outright spoil things, but if you want to really experience a movie fresh and clean, there is information below that will dirty you up! So beware of mild semi-spoilers.
Synopsis: A girl drowns in a lake (oddly, not Lake Mungo). Her family begins seeing her ghost around the house. Documentary ensues!
Scariness Type: The creepiness of realizing there's a ghost over in the corner of a video. Real creepy and nervous-making as you start looking at the dark corners of your living room, but there are no jump scares or gore.
Rating: 5/5 Wicker Chairs.
Awarded:
The Where's Waldo License Was Taken, So We Made This Instead. Seriously.
Good Stuff: This is a good movie! It's not a super 5/5, more like just a little
too good to be 4/5, but that's still a definite recommendation. It's done entirely in documentary style, but not
Blair Witch vomit-cam, more like a real documentary, where they go around interviewing the people involved, intercut with clips from videos the subjects have recorded themselves and so on. It's really perfectly executed in that regard, beyond the "we
sure are lucky they filmed all that stuff!" aspect you always find with a fake documentary. It continues along building the story just as a documentary would. If anything, it's too documentary - it's like a documentary about something more mundane, where one about a ghost like this would be much more sensationalized and trying to freak you out. This just seems to take it all pretty much in stride. Anyway, it's all believable and realistic, and tells an interesting story along the way.
Bad Stuff: The story isn't
that interesting. If this were actually a documentary, it'd be fantastic, but knowing that they made it up, it's kind of like "couldn't you have made up something more excessive?" It's still interesting enough though, and it's got some... not really twists, but elements that stand out from other ghost stories and give you something to think about. The story does zig and zag quite a bit, in the unexpected ways you'd get in a real-life story as opposed to a fictional one. And here I am saying good stuff in the Bad Stuff section, so it must've been good!
Classic Rules Of Film: We're breaking all the rules baby!!
My Take: Good stuff, interesting and creepy. Make sure you watch through the credits, where they show a bunch of little bonus shots. It made me want to go back and watch again to see if the bonuses were accurate. Wait, I will! I'm checking now... Yep! It's kind of fun. And it adds just a tiny little extra to the story as a result.
Artistic Nonsense: This movie is a fine example of just how fine the line between horror and tragedy is. Like
The Disappeared, this is almost entirely just a movie about people being sad that someone died. The ghosts are just a metaphor for the grief of the living. I don't know why I enjoy movies like that, but they do tend to work for me!
Our next movie is
The Baby's Room, in which I predict we will see a crib at some point.
