Stranger by the Lake

Director: Alain Guiraudie
Screenwriters: Alain Guiraudie

Institute History

  • 2014 Sundance Film Festival

Description

Since premiering at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival (where Alain Guiraudie won the best directing award in Un Certain Regard), Stranger by the Lake has stunned festival audiences around the world with its candid and absorbing portrait of passion and murder at a secluded lakeside cruising spot.

Handsome young Franck visits the lake daily, increasingly bold in his search for sexual partners among the nude beachgoers. He befriends lonely, middle-aged Henri, but he also obsessively fixates on the darkly attractive Michel, even after he witnesses Michel’s violent late-night encounter with his latest partner. Nonetheless, Franck remains focused on attracting Michel’s attention, no matter what the potential risks are.

Naturalistically depicting the tiny, white stone beach, Stranger by the Lake is alive with the sounds of rippling water and rustling leaves while it explicitly details the sexual encounters taking place within the lush lakeside woods. Guiraudie painstakingly constructs an amusing and astute study of a community while simultaneously generating a creeping sense of dread in this gripping thriller.

— Heidi Zwicker

Screening Details

As you use our Online Archives, please understand that the information presented from Festivals, Labs, and other activities is taken directly from official publications from each year. While this information is limited and doesn't necessarily represent the full list of participants (e.g. actors and crew), it is the list given to us by the main film/play/project contact at the time, based on the space restrictions of our publications. Each entry in the Online Archives is meant as a historical record of a particular film, play, or project at the time of its involvement with Sundance Institute. For this reason, we can only amend an entry if a name is misspelled, or if the entry does not correctly reflect the original publication. If you have questions or comments, please email [email protected]