"Falcon Lake" is the debutfilm of Charlotte Le Bon as director and got 5 stars out of 5 in my newspaper (a rating they don't give often). Combined with the fact that the film promised a combination of coming of age and horror I categorized this movie as a "must see".
I hoped for a film similar to the ones Lucile Hadzihalilovic makes them, such as "Innocence" (2004) and "Evolution" (2015), but only in a few moments "Falcon lake" matches the mysterious atmosphere of these films.
"Falcon lake" is about a 13 year old boy falling in love with a 16 year old girl, which in her turn is fond of a 19 years old boy. Both the boy and the girl are thus aiming for someone with more sexual experience and occasionaly have to compensate their lack of experience with bluff, in which the girl is better than the boy.
The problem of the movie is not the "coming of age" element, it is the "horror element". According to the already mentioned review in my newspaper the director had the intention that: "Horror should not be an accessory, but play a key role in this story about two adolescents.". She did not realise this intention. The in between shots of a deserted lake with threatening storm clouds overhead are exactly what she wants to avoid: a mere accessory. The "Sixth sense" (1999, M. Night Shyamalan) type of an ending does not compensate for this flaw.
I hoped for a film similar to the ones Lucile Hadzihalilovic makes them, such as "Innocence" (2004) and "Evolution" (2015), but only in a few moments "Falcon lake" matches the mysterious atmosphere of these films.
"Falcon lake" is about a 13 year old boy falling in love with a 16 year old girl, which in her turn is fond of a 19 years old boy. Both the boy and the girl are thus aiming for someone with more sexual experience and occasionaly have to compensate their lack of experience with bluff, in which the girl is better than the boy.
The problem of the movie is not the "coming of age" element, it is the "horror element". According to the already mentioned review in my newspaper the director had the intention that: "Horror should not be an accessory, but play a key role in this story about two adolescents.". She did not realise this intention. The in between shots of a deserted lake with threatening storm clouds overhead are exactly what she wants to avoid: a mere accessory. The "Sixth sense" (1999, M. Night Shyamalan) type of an ending does not compensate for this flaw.