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james-69388
Reviews
The Lake (2022)
Dreadful; but better in Thai
First of all, I'll preface this: watch this movie with subtitles! The dubbing is absolutely horrible and the dubbed lines are played *over* the sound effects, drowning them out and making the whole thing take on the notes of an early 2000's comedy. Dialogue is still a bit stunted in original Thai but at least it's tolerable.
With that out of the way, this movie is sadly a wreck. A lot of the other reviews here have already mentioned the fact that the editing is wild and unfocused. It is, but they've said that enough I won't go into detail on that again.
Instead what I'm going to say is that this movie is inane and pointless. It has absolutely no focus. Worse, it clearly had a half thought idea of a moral, ripped entirely from better movies, that it manages to get wrong. Long story short, it tries to play the monsters in the standard Gorgo style "leave them in peace, not so different from us" moral while wholly ignoring that the monsters were killing people left and right without provocation.
There's no generic B-movie excuses even; no moral of humans encroaching too far into nature, no ancient cave opened by weapon testing, no impact of ecosystem pollution. They just show up due to the rain and start killing. You *cannot* try for the sympathy angle with river monsters (yes, river, there is no lake in The Lake) that hunt and eat people or kill just for fun. You haven't *earned* it and all you had to do was copy the SparkNotes from any other movie to get this right.
The sad thing is that this one moral would be the only way to stitch together the incredibly loose threads vaguely about family and staying together. Not that literally any of those were done well either but at least then you could make a token attempt with parallels - instead you're left with a half dozen undercooked ideas, none of them pan out, none are exciting and frankly no part of this was worth watching if you're even slightly sober.
And it's a bloody shame because all of the pieces were right there in front of them! Like people have said, there's a scene ripped nearly wholesale from Jurassic Park and the only difference is that the humans are oblivious and the editing is terrible so it has absolutely no tension. It's like if you cheated on a test by copying someone's answers then still failed because you wrote it wrong - just embarrassing.
And I didn't even mention the dumb parts, like the inexplicable psychic link, the cops lying to protect the monsters, the complete and total lack of stage direction. But in short it's bad. Everything good was in the trailer and you can have more fun watching that on repeat. If not for the monster design and the alright Thai acting I'd go even lower on the rating but those are great so I'll leave it at three.