There is a random reason why I decided to pick Lake Artifact the movie cover looked interesting. There were a lot of images from a particular company I remember but never came across since moving to Canada. To rid myself of this unexplained curiosity, I figured I should just start it, and oddly enough, the return was much better than my other “smart” picks.
The movie opens with a two-part pre-prologue. In the first part of Prologue Lake 1953, a man filming himself murders another man with a crowbar beat, followed by him placing the camera down while he lies on the train tracks as a train comes close to him. There is a clear shot of him recording himself while beating the other man, not to mention he even has a camera to record himself during it. The next thing we see is a setting in contemporary times where a film crew is interviewing people in the region and a cult within the town. After a cut, we see one of the interviewees saying, “It was a blood bath back in October 1953.”
Kip (Chris Cimperman), Megan (Anna Shields), Grace (Catharine Daddario), and Thomas (Thomas Brazzle) go to Lake Paradox for the weekend. It doesn’t take long for everything to go downhill though. When their car breaks down, a drifter named Thomas (Dylan Grunn) stops to help. Kip and the gang invite him along, making his only condition for joining the trip (to drink Genny Cream Ale) a huge bonus.
The first night is a blast and everybody has fun. When the morning comes, Kip heads out to grab breakfast with the intention of picking up some beer too. This is when things begin to take a turn. On his way back, he discovers a mysterious picture of the group with both Thomas’s in it. The weird part is NO ONE remembers taking that picture.
Kip goes missing leading the group to scan the entire cabin only to replace him with an old man (John Willoughby Noble) who claims to be him. Things take a strange turn when they find photos of Kip in the Gem State, still without any explanation of where he has been and why he’s with such a large group of people.
One of the characters claimed, “This is some crazy Twilight Zone, Stephen King, Black Mirror shit,” and that sentiment is right on the money. To a degree, Lake Artifact delivers updated Twilight Zone-style psychodrama, and where roads morph into circles, should any expression be strange? Even more baffling, people start to behave more bizarrely when sober compared to when they’re obliterated.
With atrocities of horror yet to be fleshed out, Lake Artifact delivers sci-fi concepts wrapped around a cult detail-filled interview segment. It gives the audience more than a few bits of information, but it is not deeply integrated into the main plot. The identity of the interviewer could have also been more interesting. Bruce Wemple (Dawn of the Beast, Monstrous) misses a few too many stitches. I can’t tell if it was intended or by chance, but I do wish things were further resolved so it wouldn’t leave me pondering on any potential future visits. I’m not certain if it was done by design to leave it open-ended for a later return to the lake, but I do wish a lot more had been resolved.
Nevertheless, Lake Artifact serves as a perfect morbid exercise. That being said, this is one of those movies where the payoff is well worth the wait.
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