Perhaps the biggest idea that humanity fears is its ultimate end, specifically the physical death of the individual. The question of what happens to one’s consciousness when the body dies doesn’t generate as much emotion as what happens to those friends and family a departed person leaves behind. Death, by its very nature, creates an absence, an absence that many who are still among the living struggle to fill. Many ghost stories are not just about the ghosts that haunt them; rather, they follow those who are looking for a purpose that will help fill the absence that haunts them. Two examples of this kind of ghost story are the movie Lake Mungo and Ronald Malfi’s latest Come With Me.
Lake Mungo is a movie that uses a documentary format to tell the spine-tingling tale of Alice Palmer, a teenager who drowns in Lake Mungo and her family, who believe she is haunting them. It seems odd that this movie came out in 2009 because it accurately captures the feel of a Netflix documentary, including the testimonials of family members as they notice strange images in recordings set up to capture the ghostly phenomenon. Lake Mungo is the kind of movie that forces you to pay attention, even as its story peels back layer after layer, revealing more about Alice Palmer that even her family didn’t know. Ultimately, what haunts the Palmer family is how much they don’t know about their daughter, and their journey to find the truth is a harrowing one that leaves them with little closure and very few answers.
Come With Me, Malfi’s latest and his best so far, tells a similar story of only discovering who someone is after they’ve died. The story follows Aaron Decker, a young man who had just lost his wife Allison in a senseless shooting. As he tries to process his grief over losing the love of his life, Aaron discovers that his wife had been keeping secrets. Aaron’s journey begins with the discovery of a receipt from a motel hundreds of miles away. He soon discovers what Allison had been working on prior to her death, a project that becomes Aaron’s and one that threatens to destroy him. Malfi shows his skills at crafting mysteries, leaving an assortment of clues interspersed with red herrings, all while Aaron tries to discover not just the monster she’s been chasing but the past she’s been outrunning all her life. Malfi proves that his skills at storytelling are as precise as a watchmaker’s. One cog is Aaron, the grieving husband, who tells this story in a sort of confessional to his wife, opening a window into his emotional pain. Other smaller cogs include Malfi’s teasing of the supernatural with a level of restraint that bursts like a damn during the book’s ending. Fans of Lake Mungo will love the slow burn and harrowed protagonist of Come With Me and both movies should be taught in classes that teach writers how to create an unsettling miasma that consumes the reader.
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