The Lake (2022)

directed by Lee Thongkham

Thailand

105 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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This was something I was peripherally aware of for a while and interested in as an up-and-coming giant monster movie, but I didn't know too much about it aside from having seen someone claim it was "scarier than The Host". Also, I love that super generic tagline: "A Monster Will Rise". It certainly does! If all you get out of this is "scary giant monster movie", though, then I feel like you may have missed its underlying message - which, ironically, is also the case with The Host.

A voiceover narration at the beginning of the film provides us with some context about the world all of this is taking place in - that is to say, our world. The appearance of a monster is very much tied to the general unbalancing of nature, of climate change and the human sphere rapidly falling into chaos due to our own actions. Whether or not it's stated outright, this kind of thing is implicit in many, many monster movies: the monster as representation of a failing of things we've taken for granted about modern life, as a visual and physical indication that it's all falling apart. After a spectacular introduction to our monster, which I will address further later in this review, we start off on a farm (side note: more goats in this film than expected) where a little girl finds an unusually large egg and, unthinking, removes it from the water, causing its kin to come looking for it and venture into the middle of civilization where their presence wreaks havoc.

This movie is way more personal about its monster-on-human violence than a lot of monster movies dare to be, especially when the monster in question is huge. But to be fair, the huge one isn't the only monster here; there's a second, closer-to-human-sized, mostly bipedal creature who is the one that does most of the up-front killing. It's really brutal: we watch the characters flee from this creature as it flings other people aside ruthlessly, smashing them with its tail or its claws, carving its way through all of the farm workers until eventually the main-ish characters manage to escape to a hospital, telling their story about what they've seen (and not being believed at first, as is par for the course). The violence of this smaller monster initially raises some questions about what seems to be the core message of the film: how can we see ourselves in something that is mercilessly gouging its way through humans? But that's the truth of the whole thing, isn't it? I feel like this isn't a movie where the point is that humans vs. monsters is a one-sided battle; the monster isn't supposed to be a poor, misunderstood, helpless creature (although we do relentlessly misunderstand it), it's supposed to be like us, and we're like it. We're capable of senseless violence, sometimes to protect our own young, sometimes for no reason. So this movie is not asking us "You've just seen this monster kill all of your coworkers and your children, but please, have some sympathy for it", it's asking us "What parts of yourself do you see in what this monster is doing?" Are we ready to face that?

(Or maybe it's asking us none of this, and this is just extrapolation. But if I can't interpret art then what is art for? And what am I for?)

Okay, so let's talk about some good-looking monsters. I was extremely impressed with the first look we get of The Lake's lake creature - it is beautiful, rain-soaked and lumbering, huge and unaffected. The influences on its appearance are clearly all over the map, from aquatic creatures to dinosaurs to other monsters from other monster movies (can you feel the self-control it's taking me not to reference Godzilla in this review?), and in some frames, not in all of them, but in some of them, it looks so plausibly like a real creature that it gave me one of those moments of awe at the state of modern CGI. Unfortunately not all of it is that good, and I have a feeling that those early shots of the big monster are only as convincing as they are because of the pouring rain and darkness masking some of its rougher edges. I have to say I didn't care for the smaller monster nearly as much as I did the bigger one, and this is where you see a lot of the things that CGI can't quite smooth over, because you see it in daylight, moving at a much quicker pace than the big monster. The big one looks so real because its movements are so slow that it doesn't have the opportunity to look fake; there's not many actual life-forms that lumber around at that size, so we don't have a frame of reference to compare it to and think "boy, that looks nothing like a real animal". We're used to seeing stuff run around, and we're not as used to seeing stuff lumber, so it's easier to get away with faking lumbering. The smaller one runs and lopes and is far more motile, and looks less convincing because of that. In my opinion CGI hasn't gotten to the point where it can imitate a real creature's walk cycle perfectly - there's always something that looks unnatural, either too smooth or too jerky. I also just like the idea of a huge monster doing damage more than a littler one getting up close and personal. But the "up close and personal" is kind of the point of this film.

There's a couple of different human characters throughout this and none of them really feels like the "main" one. The one who gets the most focus on his personal backstory is (unfortunately) the cop and his recalcitrant teenage daughter. Cops with recalcitrant teenage daughters are a constant across all forms of media from all countries, and although the injection of a personal angle in a movie where most of the characters don't go beyond the surface level is probably a good thing, I was still bored by this because I see it too many times. Another thing this movie does more than expected is that thing you see in monster movies sometimes where they dedicate a few seconds to a totally clueless bystander's reaction just for comic relief: a guy with earbuds is oblivious to the carnage around him, a woman gripes about the "traffic" as people run and scream past her car, a couple snipping at each other get distracted by the huge beast about to crush their car. It's funny, and I wouldn't say The Lake overdoes this, but... it kind of gets close.

I will admit I don't fully understand the ending. I think I get the vibe, and it's something I love to see in monster movies - alternative solutions to a life post-monster than just "kill it real hard" - but if you asked me to explain it to you, I couldn't. Honestly, this movie feels like it ends around minute 80. What was happening then seemed so final that I was beginning to wonder if maybe this was just one of those movies that have ridiculously long end credits. The brunt of the film takes place over a very small slice of time, one panicked day or portion of a day when a bunch of people experience something weird and impossible, and then there's about 20 minutes of aftermath. It's interesting how the official police line is just to deny that anything happened, and it's also interesting how the film itself doesn't fully demonize anyone for this - there's no real individual human failure here, the end message is just a kind of whole-scale realization that humanity is looking at nature wrong and that this is going to come back and bite us (literally). The police chief who cements the official story that nothing happened is not necessarily a bad person, he's just doing the only thing he thinks is right; he's got family, he's seen horrific things, and this is his reaction. Our cop dad disagrees with this so much that he quits, but it's not a moment of hard feelings, just an irreconcilable difference. Faceted, measured stuff, not the knee-jerk macho yelling you expect out of cops.

There's stuff I didn't like in this and stuff I liked a lot but overall I think it's good because it's a new direction for a monster movie to go in. I would not expect anything less from Thailand's movie industry, which has produced some iconic horror films as well as multiple filmmakers who have pioneered and changed cinema in a more experimental direction. I recommend this but not if you're just looking to get scared. You have to think about it too.