Falcon Lake

Charlotte Le Bon was an actor and television presenter in Quebec and France before she directed anything. Her first feature premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2022, adapted from Bastien Vivès's graphic novel Une sœur, and was nominated for the César for best first film.

Two families share a cabin by a lake in the Laurentians. Bastien is thirteen, awkward, still young enough to be handled by his mother; Chloé is sixteen, already bored of everyone, and decides he is worth her attention on her own terms. She tells him about the ghost of a girl who drowned nearby. What follows is a summer of small negotiations — who is allowed to touch whom, who is performing for whom, who is being humiliated in front of the older teenagers at the party.

Le Bon shot on 16mm in a green-black palette, and the film keeps its supernatural framing at the level of suggestion rather than plot, which is what separates it from the coming-of-age pictures it superficially resembles. Joseph Engel and Sara Montpetit are both extraordinary, particularly Montpetit, who has to play a girl performing a version of herself for an audience of one. Critics compared it to early Sofia Coppola and to Céline Sciamma. It is a debut with genuine unease running underneath it, and it does not resolve that unease politely.