Excellent, Without a doubt!!

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Stranger by the Lake (French: L'Inconnu du lac) (2013) Director: Alain Guiraudie Watched: April 2017 6/10 The Story, Ostensibly: 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.The Story, Really: All the clothes in this film would barely fill a small box. A lot of gay sex. Many artistic long shots. Even more held shots of penises hanging out. Intriguing, but the casual handling of all the penises and the prolonged scenes with nothing but sex sounds was a little distracting. #FilmReview #LGBT

When a film is billed as a "tense thriller" there are only two things I am looking for in my viewing experience: for the film to be tense and for the film to be a thriller. Good lord this film tried my patience. In the 100 minute running time, we are treated to slowly watching the protagonist (Franck) drive into the lakeside parking area and park his car a dozen different times. Apparently, this is to cue the audience that time has past. Franck makes no decisions that make any sense. His friendship with Henri goes nowhere. His relationship with Michel goes nowhere. There is no story arc (important, to not only good storytelling, but if you want to build tension.) There is no character development. There are no redeeming qualities. At all. (To the film's credit, however, Pierre Deladonchamps (Franck) does his utmost to keep this film afloat.) No time during this chore of a film was I tense, nor was I ever thrilled. What I was, in spades, was bored.Gay cinema needs to start getting better than this.

a crime movie more than a gay one. a psychological drama more than a crime one. a film about the fragility of few men, easy to reduct to nudity or sex scenes. the end is the key to a sentimental triangle who defines each of lead characters. the sexual relation as love, the confessions and the empty state of soul, the forms of solitude and the stereotypes , the cars and the lake, the forest as refuge, each as symbol of forms of isolation and looking of sense in the other. a film who need review. for understand, behind the images, the significance of dialogs, gestures and compromises. portrait of society as a kind of parable.

STRANGER BY THE LAKE is a lean, low key thriller about a serial killer stalking a cruising spot for gay men in France. There's no more story to it than that - this is an ultra-cheap production, shot entirely in the outdoors in a single location, that somehow manages to retain the viewer's attention despite the almost entire lack of narrative thrust and propelment.Instead we get thrusting of a different variety - the director chooses to pad his story out with endless gay sex scenes, some of the most explicit ever put on camera outside of a porn film. In fact, at times, this is what the film resembles; a work of pornography with a little added plot. As a straight viewer, I can't say I was particularly involved or invested in the proceedings, and I would have felt the same had it been heterosexual sex involved.The performances are all as low key as the naturalistic, documentary feel to the production would have you expect, and yet the cinematography is pretty decent and when the film finally gets into the thriller groove in the last few scenes it becomes pretty suspenseful. Just a shame that the story itself could have been condensed into a twenty-minute short.