Critics reviews

That Alain Guiraudie's plein soleil thriller is a stunning formal accomplishment should be self-evident to anyone who sees it. What's more surprising is that a film that so insistently links sex and death can offer so much sheer pleasure—a pleasure absent either the masochistic moralizing of the Michael Haneke variety or the glibly nihilistic glee of Gone Girl.

Guiraudie brings the aesthetics, politics, and psychology of gay hook-up culture to life. Start with the fact that these guys are secluded from the rest of society. The chats are casual and coded as men feel each other out. The biological process becomes a social one (as men feel each other out). Most of all Guiraudie dramatizes the self-destructive carelessness that comes with sexual desire.

Stranger by the Lake is perhaps less of a headscratcher than some of Guiraudie's earlier work, in that there is no ambiguity about the characters' location or identity. Yet it shimmers with that intoxicating sun-on-the-water allure that might make someone not quite themselves. A large part of the film's effectiveness is down to its roster of self-imposed formal limitations, which concentrate the attention into a kind of conceptual and narrative tunnel vision.

This is a strange and brilliant film, one that manages to transcend the ironically extreme presentation of its central drama to exist as a stripped-back, Hitchcockian fable about the untenable vicissitudes of human desire... Stranger by the Lake, a deadpan erotic fable, defies easy genre categorisation at every turn, combining the best of everything (comedy, horror, erotic thriller) rather than attempting to plough its own eccentric furrow.

Guiraudie's directorial assurance is stunning: the entire movie is a master class in audiovisual storytelling, as well as an exemplary case of immersing the viewer in an environment. From the choice of the titular lake (pretty but not gorgeous), to the beautiful details of the changing sunlight, play of shadows on naked skin, and the near-enchanted quality of the surrounding forest, Guiraudie creates a coherent world we immediately feel like we inhabit.

Guiraudie fills the movie with remarkable point-of-view shots, which are both the visual and the psychological core of the film... They conjure the contrast between inwardness and privacy, between the unspoken and the unspeakable, and between the physical and the subjective aspects of sex—those that aren't in the body but in the mind.

This could all probably get very tedious very quickly, but to go with the naturalism of his actors, Guiraudie has an offhand, painterly style that captures these men at rest in ways that are elegant without ever feeling composed. The director rarely comes in close to the characters, opting instead to regard them in full or wide shots: This not only makes their bodies ever-present, but also creates a strange aura of unknowability.

As withholding as it may be in terms of narrative, Strangerplaces rare faith in the viewer's visual sense. Guiraudie presents his widescreen long takes with little inflection, conjuring suspense simply from the sounds of crackling leaves and other hallmarks of the natural (or is it au naturel?) realm.

Though its structure is simple — the film unfolds over 10 consecutive summer days, its action confined to the lake and the nearby grove where sex is sought — Stranger abounds with precision and detail, evinced not just in the spectacular visual composition but also in the observation of behavioral codes in carnally charged spaces.

Guiraudie has a sly, pensive wit; "at cruising spots, at least you can talk to strangers," says Henri (Patrick d'Assumçao), a lonely and ostensibly straight man who forms a platonic friendship with Franck. The movie's careful construction does yield to some pat closing ironies. But in a world where any kind of assembly-line dreck can be sold as an "erotic thriller," this one more than earns the designation.

Though Stranger by the Lake leans a bit too heavily on its long-take, slow-cinema bona fides, there's a clear purpose to Guiraudie's rigorous perspective. He's out to unearth the very potent (and often terrifying) emotions underlying every explicit act, sexual or otherwise. As Franck comes to learn over the course of this hauntingly elemental allegory, death and love are consummate bedfellows.

...Guiraudie's rigorous attention to composition, as in the strong diagonal shot four minutes into the film or his preference for protracted, wide side-by-side two-shots over a conventional shot-countershot breakdown, connects the two men both spatially and emotionally. "I like talking with you," Henri says simply. Guiraudie's precisely planned visual organization, in which Franck's point of view is often intercut with objective shots to heighten ambiguity, does the rest of the telling.