Saw Lake Mungo, an unconventional Australian ghost movie. It's filmed in a documentary style, interviews spliced with footage from the central family's home movies. The premise is that the daughter of a family dies in a swimming accident. Soon the remaining family begins hearing creaks and bangs, begins seeing shadowy figures in their photographs. They begin investigating the death of their daughter and her life which is not all it seems.
The mood reminded me a lot of David Lynch (spoiler) particularly Twin Peaks (/spoiler). It's not homage-y or even very clearly borrowing, but when it tries to be creepy, it achieves this very Lynchian other-worldliness. There's only one conventional jump-scare but the bulk of the film is talking heads and voice-overs narrating slow pans down perfectly ordinary hallways, made creepy by lighting and mood. An oppressive tension mounts during these crawls. The filmmakers don't keep an iron grip on this tension, however, and they let the tension curdle into confusion and unease. This works thematically as the film is really not interested anyway in the easy scariness of the haunting, but in the complex scariness of small-town secrets and the madness of grief.
Every character you meet in the film is corrupt and flawed in some way. When the machinery behind the ghost is explained, it disappointed me (as usual.) The film would have been much better is the ghost had literally been a manifestation of mental problems, instead of just symbolically. Not a bad film. Not as scary as a horror fan might want, but it has mood and atmosphere.
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