The sound design is crucial: the constant chirping of cicadas, the soft lapping of water, the crunch of gravel under tires, and the sudden, shocking silence after violence. The lack of a non-diegetic score (except for a brief, haunting operatic moment) heightens the realism and the tension.
Upon its release, Stranger by the Lake (a.k.a. L'Inconnu du Lac ) won the Best Director award in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. It went on to win numerous awards at the Césars and the Louis Delluc Prize.
This is not a romanticized vision of nature. While the sun shines brightly, there is an ominous stillness to the water. The woods are dark and labyrinthine. The setting feels hermetic, cut off from the rest of society. It is a temporary autonomous zone where societal norms are suspended, but new, dangerous rules apply. The lake is a place of pleasure, but as the title suggests, it is also a place of the unknown.
Furthermore, the film features unsimulated sexual acts and full-frontal nudity. However, unlike exploitative cinema, these sequences in Stranger by the Lake feel anthropological. The nudity is ordinary. Bodies are shown in all their vulnerability—talking, eating sandwiches, scratching insect bites, and swimming. By normalizing the male body, Guiraudie strips away the mystique of the cruising ground. The result is that when the violence occurs, it feels shockingly real. The murder is not stylized; it is a messy, wet, horrifying struggle that looks exactly like a drowning.
