Stranger by the Lake

A skillful Hitchcockian thriller weakened by a slack tempo--which does, to approach from another perspective, give one ample opportunity to admire the gorgeous cinematography and sound--and some unnecessarily/distractingly explicit sex. An ending would have been nice.

A rather well shot, but pedestrian affair about good-looking young man "Franck" who frequents a gay cruising area on a lake shore and falls for a stranger. Around the same time, an ex-lover of the stranger is found drowned. What makes this film interesting is that both we, and him, know what happened and yet he decidedly refuses to co-operate with the police and puts himself and others at considerable risk. Is it infatuation or indifference or both? This is an oddly arid piece of cinema. At best it shows this cruising community as indifferent to the crime; and worst to a callousness that is quite shudderingly numb and unbelievably inhuman.