- Directed by Joel Anderson
- Written by Joel Anderson
- Stars Rosie Traynor, David Pledger, Martin Sharpe
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 27 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2ISuVvP-XI
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It’s a very well done documentary that does a nice job of letting events that happened unfold and be discovered by the viewer. Except it’s totally fiction. Just when you think you know what’s going on, they add another layer to things. And another. And so on. The acting and filming all seem pretty genuine.
Synopsis
“Alice kept secrets,” we are told as credits roll over images of old ghostly photographs. In 2005, a tragic accident began a series of events that thrust the grieving family into the media spotlight. This is a paranormal documentary of what happened to the family.
We see news reports of the family being interviewed after the accident. Sixteen-year-old Alice went missing, drowned at the dam. We meet various characters that knew or were related to Alice as the interviewer asks them questions. It took several days before they found the body.
In the coming months, they started hearing sounds coming from Alice’s old room. June, her mother, started having nightmares and developed a tendency to sneak into other people’s houses. Her father, Russell, kept hearing things in her room until he saw her there in her bedroom. Brother Matthew started getting random bruises all over his body; he also started taking many strange photographs— Alice appears in one of them, four months after her death.
They started to doubt if the body found was really Alice; she must still be alive. They exhume the body, and sure enough, DNA confirms that it was really her. So, who was in those photos?
Six months after her death, Matthew catches her on video. It’s dim and fuzzy, but there’s clearly something there.
They call in Ray, a psychic, to help. Ray sets up a seance, which Matthew also filmed. The seance didn’t appear to work, but they spotted Alice in the video the next day. Later, Matthew admits that he’d faked several photos with camera trickery. He wasn’t trying to fool people; he was just trying to keep his sister in their lives.
Still, they all felt that there was something in the house, so they let the cameras run while they took a little trip. Alice still appeared in the new videos. They also spotted their neighbor, Mr. Toohey in Alice’s room— he was looking for “the tape.”
Next, we see the tape. Toohey had Alice and another girl doing a sex tape. He knew she had a copy, and Toohey wanted to find it before anyone else did.
It turns out Ray had also seen Alice before her death. She’d been having bad dreams. Ray didn’t tell anyone this because of his confidentiality. They no longer trust Ray after this revelation. June reads Alice’s diary and considers the dreams Alice had told Ray about— had she foreseen her own death?
Alice had gone on a school trip to Lake Mungo a few months before her death, and they examine found video footage from that. Alice was seen in the woods, burying something.
The family returned to Lake Mungo to find out what had happened while Alice had been there. They went to the place where Alice had been digging. They dug up Alice’s ring, her watch, and her mobile phone.
On the buried phone they found more footage. A strange figure came out of the darkness; it was the same dead body that came out of the lake. Alice had foreseen her own death, and this was some kind of omen. She had seen her own ghost.
When the family returned home, the house felt clean. Maybe Alice just wanted them to know the whole truth.
Ray hypnotizes June one last time to wrap things up. June describes walking through the house, and her vision overlaps with an old recording of Alice having the same experience from her own point of view. They are together, but at different times.
They sell the house and move. Could that still be Alice in the window?
Commentary
It’s a fairly straightforward ghost story, but the documentary-style interviews and editing make it much more interesting than a straight narrative. The low-quality, grainy, ghostly images are like what you’d expect on old Bigfoot videos— they’re really well done and creepy.
I liked the development that a lot of the video we saw was faked by Matthew. Then the surprises start coming more quickly. There’s not really much explanation of why this all happened, but then if there was, it wouldn’t be a mystery, right?
It’s good in a very creepy way. It makes great use of found footage, grainy zooms, blurry images, and so forth.