Mark Reviews Movies: LAKE OF DEATH

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 15, 2020

A half-hearted horror movie and a blatantly transparent mystery, Lake of Death also features inconsistent characters who make contradictory or irrational decisions. They don't make as many as they could over the course of this aimless story, but that's only because so many of them spend most of their time in the movie serving as obvious red herrings.

The plot, a re-working of Bernard Borge's novel of the same name (in its original Norwegian, at least), has Lillian (Iben Akerlie) returning to the lake house where her twin brother Bjørn (Patrick Walshe McBride) disappeared a year prior. Gabriel (Jonathan Harboe), her ex-boyfriend (a relationship that isn't established until the third act), thinks this will help give Lillian closure.

Joining them on the trip are a couple, Harald (Elias Munk) and Sonja (Sophia Lie), and Bernhard (Jakob Schøyen Andersen), a podcaster who covers the supernatural. Lillian's other ex-boyfriend Kai (Ulric von der Esch), who gives the group a ride to the isolated house, fills them in on the area's creepy history, which includes dead kids and a man who killed his wife, as well as himself, after being hypnotized by the lake.

Writer/director Nini Bull Robsahm quickly starts with the odd occurrences—mostly random noises throughout the house, which leads to the first many lengthy and anticlimactic scenes. Those happenings kind of build, such as when the group discovers a breakfast that none of them made awaiting them and a trip to a hidden basement, but Robsahm waits until the third act for any kind of payoff.

The gist of the mystery is that one of them, some stranger, or some strange supernatural presence is messing with their minds, possibly trying to harm or kill them. On top of it, Lillian is a sleepwalker, leading her to have eerie dreams, mistaken visions, and episodes of being drawn to the lake. Her friends eventually tie her to the bed at the worst possible time—when the survivors are convinced that there's a murderer on the loose.

Robsahm shows some panache in the imagery here, from insulating wide shots of the lake and its surrounding forest to Lillian's waking and sleeping nightmares, but it can't compensate for the story. Lake of Death neither builds tension nor generates scares, and that's only partially to do with the fact that the final answer here is painfully apparent.

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