Yes, this one takes its style and structure from the Blair Witch playbook, but the trolls make all the difference. The filmmakers haven't tried to make their trolls look plausible or somehow alien; these trolls look like something from an illustration in a kids' book of fairy tales: they have multiple heads, cartoonishly bulbous noses, a galumphing walk, and, true to legend, they like to lurk under bridges. These trolls are also very, very big, and the director, Andre Ovredal, deserves credit for making them more menacing than that critter in Cloverfield, despite the fact that trolls are, well, silly.
The plot, such as it is, has some eager college kids deciding to make a documentary about Hans, a man they suspect is a bear poacher. This early part of the story isn't setup very well, but it serves to get us to the trolls. Hans, it turns out, is actually a trollhunter employed by the Norwegian government to keep trolls in check. The government wants to keep trolls hush-hush, but Hans is tired of the secrecy and lets himself be filmed. What follows is something of a nature documentary as Hans talks matter-of-factly about the natural history of trolls. We also see Hans at his work, which consists of tracking down rogue trolls and killing them with light. Trolls, as all Norwegian kids know, die if exposed to light, or, in this case, a battery of lights mounted on a truck.
The climax of the film takes place on a snowy plateau where Hans faces off against a 200-foot tall mountain troll. It's at this point, if not before, that you realize this film looks as good or better than most Hollywood creature features, and that's with a budget of only $3m. All is not perfect with Trollhunter: the college kids are superfluous, and the film cries out for a bit more humour (these are effing trolls!), but it's certainly a lot of fun. In fact, I'd be willing to watch a Trollhunter 2 as long as they keep the budget low.
The Australian film Lake Mungo is a faux documentary; let's get that out of the way right off the top. I make a point of mentioning this because if you see this film you will, at several points, have to remind yourself that it is not actually a doc. The director, Joel Anderson, has done an amazing job of creating a film that looks and feels as though it was created by a world-class documentary maker. This is not one of those Blair Witch-type films filled entirely with shaky-cam shots and grainy video footage. There is some of that in Lake Mungo, but its restrained use makes these scenes all the more effective.
Lake Mungo is about the Palmer family, who come to believe that they're being haunted by their 16-year-old daughter, Alice, after she drowns in a lake. The family seeks the aid of a psychic and uses video cameras to help determine if they are, in fact, being haunted.
That quick summary makes Lake Mungo sound like just another Paranormal Activity clone, the kind of film in which we wait for the next moment when something jumps out at us and the screaming ensues. Lake Mungo is quite definitely about the supernatural, and there is a ghost, but it is much more than a scarefest. It's one the finest dramas I've seen in quite a few years.
You could say that this film is primarily a study of grief: an incisive, sympathetic, nuts and bolts look at how a family copes with a tragic loss. In fact, the more times you view this film, the more you concentrate on the family drama side of the story and less on the supernatural. Lake Mungo is also about family secrets, about the way otherwise normal, happy families can keep things from one another. One of the biggest shocks in the movie is not caused by a spectral figure, but by a revelation about Alice.
A great deal of the strength of this film comes from its cast, who improvised their dialogue based on plot points they had to hit. If this is what improvisation can achieve, why bother with scriptwriters? Another aspect that merits praise is the look of the film. Anderson and his cinematographer have a knack for choosing just the right angles and lighting tones for their interior shots. Even better is their sensational use of time lapse photography, striking night skies, and electronic sound effects to make the Palmer's house and the surrounding town seem that much eerier.
Is Lake Mungo scary? It's definitely creepy, unsettling, chilling, and there's certainly one jump-in-your-seat moment. Comments about it I've read online, mostly from diehard horror fans, express annoyance that it isn't scary enough. My daughter (a generally sensible third-year law student) found it so frightening she watched (heard) most of the film from behind a pillow, and then spent the next five nights sleeping with the lights on. I think it works brilliantly as both a ghost story and a drama. After seeing it for the first time I left the film feeling terribly sad rather than frightened. I felt as though I'd shared the Palmer's loss, rather than suffered through a haunting.
Lake Mungo is supposed to be remade by an American studio (now that's scary), so order it from Amazon before it turns up in your local cinema starring Lady GaGa and David Hasselhoff.
