Stranger by the Lake

Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake unfolds like a slow-burning spell. Set around a secluded cruising beach, the film explores desire, danger, and the strange intimacy between strangers. Minimalist yet deeply provocative, it quietly dismantles our expectations of morality and attraction. Guiraudie invites us into a space where pleasure and fear coexist, asking what risks we are willing to take in the pursuit of connection. — Fay Nass, Queering Cinema curator

A simple and ruthlessly effective exercise in minimal narrative and style, Alain Guiraudie’s moral tale is so restrained and atmospheric that the nudity and graphic sex don’t upstage the creepy mood of seductive, inescapable doom.

Peter Keough, Boston Globe

Guiraudie’s thriller is characterised both by its formal ingenuity and its surprisingly graphic gay sex. The plotting rekindles memories both of Patricia Highsmith novels and of Hitchcock films.

Geoffrey Macnab, The Independent

Guiraudie’s film is acutely brilliant on the funny, scary machinery of desire, and how easily humans can get caught up in its cogwheels.

Robbie Colin, Daily Telegraph