Summertime. A cruising spot for men, tucked away on the shores of a lake. Franck falls in love with Michel. An attractive, potent and lethally dangerous man. Franck knows this, but wants to live out his passion anyway.
One hopes in any case that trepidation over a little erotic content won’t prevent a wide audience from experiencing such an unusual and intelligent film.
French writer-director Alain Guiraudie shapes a sharp, smart, Hitchcockian thriller.
The whole film pulses with a tangible sense of danger and obsession.
Sun, sex, psychosis, skinny-dipping: it sounds like genre tat, but Guiraudie’s dark, droll study of a risky attraction upends expectations. It plays by stealth, but its sly grip is sure.
Beautifully crafted, sinister, frightening, erotic and thought-provoking, Alain Guiraudie’s multi-faceted Cannes triumph is already one of the most provocative, intriguing films of the year.
This stunning psychological drama takes place in an atmosphere of frank homoeroticism, utterly without inhibition or taboo.
However you read it, the film is compelling and audaciously candid in its erotic charge, while an ending that literally leaves us in the dark is one of the most haunting sign-offs in recent cinema.
Only in the final reel, with its unconvincing police investigation, does the film lose its momentum.
An innovative new twist on what is essentially a classic tale of amour fou.
Ratcheting up the tension in ways that are palpable but never obvious, Guiraudie isolates and interrogates the danger of desire that has been the bedrock of so many thrillers, making it uncomfortably real with a disturbing and ambiguous conclusion that reinforces the irrational way it affects behaviour.
Interview: film director Alain Guiraudie discuesses Stranger by the Lake
Alain Guiraudie
Edinburgh Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Friday March 7, 2014, until Thursday March 20, 2014. Not on March 14-17.. More info: www.filmhousecinema.com
Glasgow Film Theatre, Glasgow from Friday March 7, 2014, until Thursday March 13, 2014. More info: http://www.glasgowfilm.org/theatre/
Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee from Friday March 14, 2014, until Thursday March 20, 2014. More info: www.dca.org.uk
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