Stranger by the Lake (2013)

Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) spends the summer frequenting an all-male nude beach where men come to sunbathe and to engage in casual sex in the woods nearby. One quiet evening, he secretly witnesses a man, Michel (Christophe Paou), whom he briefly met earlier in the day, drown another young man, perhaps his lover, in the lake. Despite this knowledge, Franck finds himself so intensely and inexplicably drawn to the killer that he establishes a relationship and quickly begins falling in love with him.

Laced with highly-charged erotic undertones, "Stranger By the Lake" is a low-keyed, multi-leveled thriller whose dark and disturbing themes simmer beneath a deceptively simple surface. The sex is certainly graphic in its depiction - no simulation going on here, folks - but it is germane to the storytelling and integral to the theme.

Written and directed by Alain Guiraudie, this psycho-sexual chiller achieves an uber-creepy tone without resorting to a single cliché associated with the overworked genre. Heck, there isn't even any music to helpfully alert us to the story's moments of greatest intensity. The movie creates suspense through the observation of character rather than through overt action or violence, with the placidity of the setting placed in stark relief against the grimness of the crime.

Except for the fact that it's in color, "Stranger By the Lake" has much of the look and feel of an early Michelangelo Antonioni film, what with its languid pacing, the artful minimalism of its shots, and the obliqueness of its storytelling and characters. In fact, what's most disturbing about the characters is their seemingly utter detachment not only from the society around them but from their own emotions and any semblance of a moral code. They seem to float freely about in a world of their own making, one in which they live only for the absorption of the moment and in which they are cut off completely from any meaningful human connection. In a way, casual sex is merely an external manifestation of the much more serious underlying condition of angst and alienation (a favorite theme of Antonioni's work, in fact) that's come to define their mode of living and, by extension, much of modern society itself. But is it really possible for an individual to remain that detached from everyone and everything, or is that just a pose designed to keep us from having to actively engage in life with all its attended complications and messiness?

Guiraudie raises the question, then leaves it up to the audience to come up with its own answer. For that is the way with "Stranger By the Lake." It disturbs us in so many different ways, while at the same time refusing to spoon-feed us or to play to our expectations as so many movies routinely do. It assumes that we are mature enough to handle both its raw sexuality and its super-dark vision of the world. And, for that alone, any true movie-lover should be immensely grateful.

Fmovies: What drives people to engage in self-destructive behavior? Why do people seek out things (people, actions) that are bad for them? These seem to be the questions at the center of "Stranger by the Lake," a quiet film that casts an unsettling spell.

Franck is a young gay man who makes daily visits to an idyllic lakefront beach that serves as a popular gay cruising spot. Men scope each other out and then with a nod of the head or wink of the eye agree to wander off into the bushes to engage in all sorts of sexual activities, safe or otherwise. Franck crushes on Michel, a studly guy who proudly struts around naked, and finally succeeds in securing a tryst with him. But then one night he witnesses Michel casually drown another man. In one of the film's most effective twists, the knowledge of Michel's murderous tendencies draws Franck closer to him, and we watch him fall more and more for this guy who we know he should be turning in.

The film is one sustained note of creeping dread. From the start we just feel like things are headed to a bad place, and we stare with morbid fascination to see just what that bad place will be. All sorts of unpleasant spectres flirt at the margins of these men's lives. There's something predatory about the act of cruising in the first place, and the loneliness of Franck's life -- never explicitly shown but always implied -- makes him that much easier a victim. And then there are the unspoken phantoms of disease and addiction that color the men's behavior. For Franck, sexually transmitted diseases are a risk worth taking for the thrill of the hookup, just as an addict sets the consideration of consequences aside until after the high has worn off. Franck is compulsively drawn to the lake again and again long past the point where better sense, not to mention an instinct for self preservation, should prevail, and he willingly puts himself in greater danger as the film progresses. It's tempting to read the Michel character as a sort of personification of the allure of self abuse -- the excitement of self-imposed danger turned into an enticing and literal bogeyman.

The ending to the film is ambiguous and supremely creepy. It's a movie that's hard to get out of your head after you've seen it.

Grade: A

This film tells what goes on among the men cruising by a beautiful lake in the summer, somewhere in France.

"Stranger by the Lake" is a single location film, with all scenes happening in or by the lake. The story focuses on a handsome young man who gets attracted to a dangerous man, putting his life at risk. Then, relationships between them, and a solitary man who sits by the lake gets complicated. Though the pacing is pretty slow in the beginning, the paces accelerates at lightning speed towards the end, delivering much thrills that makes people hold their breath. The ending is left open, but scenes just before the film ends are shocking and almost aggravating, evoking much gasps of horror and shouts of exasperation in the cinema.

Together with the highly explicit scenes, "Stranger by the Lake" is quite an thrilling eye opener that tells the truth in a cruising ground, and how love is completely blind.

Stranger by the Lake fmovies. Not much to add to the other comments made here, but I'll say that this film was pretty fantastic! It offers a keen inside view of the gay community living and cruising around the lake of the title. All the characters are dead on: the cute guy, the old queens, the pervert etc. with no judgment whatsoever. The pacing can seem long to some, but I quite enjoyed the repetitive installation shots. It mirrored the compulsive visits to the lake the hero makes, in hopes of finding love, even if he himself knows it's a futile quest.

"L'inconnu du lac" screened at the FNC (Festival du Nouveau Cinema) a few weeks ago, where I saw "Interior. Leather Bar." (the James Franco and Travis Mathews doc). I couldn't help but see a connection with some of the stuff Franco discussed. Our objections to porn and graphic sex are mostly constructed by society rather than rooted in any inherently moral reasons. The sex scenes in "L'inconnu du lac" are very graphic but never gratuitous. They expose the mal de vivre of the gay men who visit this beautiful lake better than words could.

There are some thriller tropes here and there, a tiny bit of suspense, but at its core, it's mostly a chronicle, we follow, for a few day, a handful of men cruising by a lac. Some will be taken aback by the highly graphical nature of the movie, but I deeply believe that the point here isn't shock value, but simply the desire to shoot that peculiar microcosm completely untethered, and that, Giraudie (the writer- director) certainly does in spades! Idiots will talked about porn, but this clearly isn't masturbation material, it truly is masterful and heartfelt filmmaking, art in the true sense of the word, but with a lot of fellatio and hand jobs between men! It should speak to all of us, because at its core is the fear of absolute loneliness, even amongst one's kin, and the character of Henri in that respect is quite fascinating. Basically the man is a clam, his mind seems unfathomable, is he looking for a friend, is he looking for a lover? What does he truly want from the protagonist Franck? Who knows? So, to sum it up, don't take your parents to see this film, trust me, but go, you'll thank me later!

A very explicit French gay-themed film. Sometimes it felt a bit overly so - including graphic unsimulated scenes of oral sex and even a shot of a man, erm, climaxing. But I kind of admire the movie at the same time for not shying away from showing anything. The characters are intriguing and the film is beautifully photographed in long, uninterrupted takes and panning shots of the lake setting. The setting itself is one of the best things about the movie. Everything takes place either on the lake or shore surrounding it, in the forest behind the lake, or a car park. You become so accustomed to these settings that everything else outside them seems meaningless - for instance we never see what the main character does for a living, or the supposed 'happy hour' drinks many of the cruising characters in this film attend after a day on the lake. None of that would've been necessary because the film is all about the character's interactions with one another on the beach, anything else would've felt out-of-place. It's a brilliant choice on the part of the director and has an interesting, hard-to-describe effect on the viewer. The film also has a healthy dose of humor (the police inspector is hilarious) and several very intense scenes, especially towards the ending. Recommended, but not for the squeamish or conservative!