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Lake Mungo Review

October 1, 2025·1 hr 26 min·7 clips

Alice standing at her parents' bed at night, crying, realizing her parents can no longer help her.

Lake Mungo opens in grief mode. Once the ad clutter and title riffing pass, the review settles on Alice as a daughter whose fear has already moved beyond what her parents can fix. The bed scene lands hard. The panel does not treat it as random ghost business. They read it as Alice realizing that comfort has stopped working right when she needs it most. Time gets sticky after that. They work through the movie's nonlinear haunting logic, where Alice seeing herself and her family sensing her can sit on the same bruised plane. The psychic sessions play cleanly. The mother-daughter material hurts because the mother wants contact but still cannot quite reach Alice. That regret is the point. The haunting works because every discovery about Alice throws the family's helplessness back at them after she is gone. Then Matthew makes the whole thing messier. His doctored photos and videos bother the room, even with the movie's explanation that his mother had started doubting the haunting. It feels too practical, in a way that keeps nagging. That fits the show. One person follows the movie's intent, another keeps poking the choice until it looks suspicious. The criticism never gets too neat. They can admire the structure, the grief, and the time-bent sadness while still stopping to ask why a character would make everything harder. Near the end, the talk drifts into a documentary recommendation, Patton Oswalt's wife, her Golden State Killer research, and the shock of that investigation turning real. The room knows it wandered. By the goodbye, the episode is very much itself: a serious Lake Mungo reading dragged through jokes, objections, and one awkward last exit.

As heard by us

An opinionated, funny listen that keeps returning to the film's grief and family strain.

Horror Movie Talk takes on Lake Mungo with its usual mix of sharp opinions and off-kilter humor. The discussion leans into grief, family strain, and the way time changes the shape of a haunting, especially in the image of Alice and the hard truth that her parents cannot reach…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play if you want Horror Movie Talk's Lake Mungo review to treat memory and regret like the real haunting.

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