Stranger by the Lake

Alain Guiraudie had been making singular, little-seen films in the south of France for fifteen years when Stranger by the Lake took the directing prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2013 along with the Queer Palm, and was then voted best film of the year by Cahiers du cinéma. Pierre Deladonchamps won the César for most promising actor.

The entire film takes place at one lake: a car park, a path through the trees, a beach where men sunbathe, and the woods behind it where they meet. Guiraudie shoots it with almost forensic rigour — the same handful of set-ups, the same walk from car park to shore, no music at all, and days marked only by the light changing. Franck comes every day. He befriends Henri, a heavy, melancholy man who sits apart and does not participate. He wants Michel, who has a moustache and a girlfriend problem. Then Franck watches something happen in the water at dusk and comes back the next morning anyway.

The sex is explicit and entirely unsensational, filmed with the same flatness as the conversations, which is precisely what makes the film's turn work. It is a Hitchcock construction — desire and complicity, a man who knows and says nothing — transposed to a place with its own rules. Few thrillers of the last twenty years are this controlled, or this genuinely unnerving without a single jump.