If you’ve ever wanted to watch a horror movie that feels like a weekend Airbnb trip sponsored by depression and poor script choices, Lake of Death is here to fulfill that oddly specific wish. Everyone else might want to stay in the city.
This 2019 Norwegian supernatural horror film is a remake of a 1958 classic, which was itself based on a 1942 novel—a multi-generational game of cinematic telephone that ends with this version mumbling, “Uh… something about a lake making you sad and maybe crazy?” Nini Bull Robsahm writes and directs, apparently determined to prove that you canhave beautiful scenery, solid actors, and still somehow produce a horror movie with the energy of a damp towel.
Twin Trauma, Single Idea
Our protagonist is Lilian (Iben Akerlie), a woman who returns to her lakeside forest house a year after her troubled twin brother’s death. Already, that’s a solid horror foundation: grief, guilt, isolation, twins—this is horror bingo territory. She shows up with a group of friends, the kind of vaguely defined ensemble you recognize instantly from the Netflix horror shelf: the funny one, the serious one, the love interest, the one who should’ve stayed home.
The house is near a lake with a local legend: it can drive some people mad. So to sum up: trauma, water, folklore, remote cabin, memories of a dead twin. That’s practically a ready-made horror stew. All Robsahm had to do was turn up the heat.
Instead, the film sets the stove to “mildly warm” and then spends the next 90 minutes stirring the pot and telling you how spooky cooking could be.
Lilian begins having creepy visions, as you do in this genre: weird imagery, unsettling sounds, a creeping sense that something is off. The rest of the group notices strange things too. Doors creak. People act weird. The lake… sits there, looking picturesque and underutilized.
The problem isn’t that the movie is slow. Slow-burn horror can be phenomenal. The problem is that this is less a slow burn and more a long, repetitive simmer where nothing quite boils—just occasionally burps out a jump scare and goes back to being moody.
The Lake is Deep; the Script is Shallow
For a film called Lake of Death, the actual lake is criminally underused. It’s treated like an atmospheric screensaver rather than an active threat. Every now and then someone mentions the legend about it driving people mad, but the movie never fully commits to exploring what that madness means.
Is the lake supernatural? Is it psychological? Is it both? The film seems to think “ambiguity” means “we didn’t decide.” It flirts with psychological horror—Lilian’s grief, her guilt over her brother, the haunting legacy of twin loss—but keeps throwing in half-hearted supernatural bits like it’s afraid audiences will get bored if nothing explicitly ghostly happens for five minutes.
So we get a hybrid of psychological and supernatural scare tactics, except instead of creating a rich, layered horror experience, it mostly creates confusion and déjà vu. You keep thinking, “Didn’t we already do this scene where someone hears something and slowly investigates a shadowy corner?” Yes. Yes you did. Twice.
The Cast Deserved a Better Vacation
The actors are not the problem. Iben Akerlie does what she can with a character who spends most of her time looking haunted, sad, or confused—which, to be fair, is appropriate given the script. The supporting cast—Jakob Schøyen Andersen as Bernhard, Sophia Lie as Sonja, Elias Munk as Harald, and the rest—deliver functional, sometimes even charming performances.
The chemistry between them hints at a richer movie that never shows up. You get flashes of personality—inside jokes, mild banter, glimpses of shared history—but the script seems almost irritated by the idea of making us care about these people. Instead of deepening them, it shoves them into generic horror situations and hopes the atmosphere will do the heavy lifting.
The result is a group of characters who feel like they’ve wandered in from a better Scandinavian drama and are now stuck in a horror remake that keeps them at arm’s length emotionally.
Meta-Horror Without the “Meta” Part
One of the most baffling choices is how often the film nods to other horror movies—as if pointing at better films will somehow upgrade this one by association. Characters make quips about horror tropes, name-drop other plots, and generally act like they’ve seen all this before.
That kind of self-awareness can work. Scream did it brilliantly; The Cabin in the Woods built its whole existence on it. But those films used meta-commentary to push the genre somewhere clever. Lake of Death seems content to smirk and say, “Haha, horror movies, right?” while doing absolutely nothing to step out of their shadow.
It’s like watching someone stand in a haunted house saying, “Wow, it would be so cliché if a ghost popped out right now,” and then a ghost pops out, exactly as predicted, and everyone just kind of shrugs.
If you’re going to poke fun at clichés, you should probably avoid drowning in them.
Atmosphere, Atmosphere, Atmosphere… and Not Much Else
To the film’s credit, the technical elements are polished. The cinematography is clean and moody. The forest and lake are shot beautifully—mist hanging over the water, trees closing in like a natural cathedral of doom. The color grading screams Nordic Melancholy™. Sound design? Also solid. Lots of nicely placed creaks, whispers, and unsettling noises in the distance.
But all that craft in service of… what, exactly?
Atmosphere is a tool, not the entire toolbox. You can’t just point the camera at a foggy lake and say, “Be afraid,” for 90 minutes. At some point, the audience needs escalation, stakes, twists that are more than mildly surprising, or revelations that make the journey feel worthwhile.
Instead, Lake of Death gives you beautifully photographed repetition. Walk, hear, see something, doubt yourself, repeat. It becomes less tense and more numbing, like being trapped in a very moody looped screensaver with occasional human dialogue.
A Remake That Feels Like a Ghost of Itself
The most tragic part is that this story means something in Norwegian culture. The 1958 film and the original novel are classics, often cited as foundational works in Scandinavian horror. There’s genuine psychological richness in the core idea: a mysterious lake, a fragile mind, and the thin line between sanity and the supernatural.
But this remake never finds its own voice. It’s so busy nodding respectfully to its ancestors and winking at other horror movies that it forgets to develop a strong personality of its own. It’s like a haunted echo: you can hear something interesting in the distance, but up close it’s just faint repetition.
You can almost feel the movie straining for significance—trying to be a thoughtful exploration of grief and madness—but undercutting itself with half-hearted genre concessions and a lack of narrative commitment.
The Slow Burn That Burns Out
Critics have called Lake of Death a slow burn that fizzles, a film buried under its influences, and a collection of clichés in nice packaging. They’re not wrong. It’s not aggressively terrible—it’s not so bad it becomes hilariously entertaining. It’s something worse for horror fans: thoroughly forgettable.
If horror is about getting under your skin, Lake of Death barely scuffs the surface. The only thing it might actually kill is your attention span.
There’s a darker, sharper, scarier version of this film somewhere in the fog—a version that embraces the psychological angle, fully explores the twin dynamic, and uses the lake as an actual character instead of a backdrop. Unfortunately, that version stayed at the bottom of the water.
In this one, all you get is an okay-looking weekend at a cursed cabin with some decent actors, decent vibes, and a story that keeps promising to pull you under… but never quite does more than get your ankles damp.
