Falcon Lake

Charlotte Le Bon came up with the brilliant idea of depicting teen romance through the formalistic lexicon of horror. Because what is more terrifying, more monstrous and more unsettling than growing up, shyness, the insecurity that comes with persistently recurring feelings and pretending to be cool in front of others? This idea in itself could have been enough, but Falcon Lake transcends it in the way that it captivatingly observes and then delicately projects onto the screen the intense excitement, worries and awkwardness of one’s first great teen love, when childhood naïveté and fragility are combined with the flood of hormones coursing through one’s body. At the beginning, the slow pace and genre-appropriate building of tension may seem out of place, but when you accept these aspects, the film will not only get under your skin, but also into your heart and may even drag up old wounds and indiscretions. Diving below the surface of Falcon Lake is thus both fittingly painful and romantically beautiful. (01.10.2023)