What is it to be a ghost but to suffer the complete absence of love? Actress Charlotte Le Bon’s arresting directorial debut, Falcon Lake, is a coming-of-age film that melds teenage love stories with gothic horror, but not in an elaborate, over-the-top way. In adapting Bastien Vivès’ 2017 graphic novel, Le Bon has offered an honest story of young love set against a moody, ominous backdrop of a lake rumored to be the watery grave of a long-dead child.
From the beginning, Le Bon establishes that this won’t be your typical “summer catch” story. We’re introduced to 16-year-old Chloé (Sara Montpetit) as she’s floating face down in the water, appearing to our eyes to be quite dead. She pops up, very much alive, after an excruciatingly long pause, the camera never taking its lens off of her. But this is who Chloé is. She has been obsessed with the urban legend of a girl who drowned in the lake, and now walks the Quebec forests as a ghost. At this age, Chloé has all of the jumbled emotions of your typical teen girl. Spirited and adventurous one moment, forlorn the next.
But Chloé is also the oldest child at the vacation retreat where her mom is reunited with a childhood friend. She brings along her 13-year-old son, Bastien (Joseph Engel), a shy, quiet kid not quite ready to be a man but also too old to be hanging out with the kiddies. Chloé doesn’t take much interest in him at first, seeing Bastien as a harmless youngest brother who just happens to be close enough in age. But as he becomes a willing listener to her macabre stories about dead girls in lakes, Chloé takes a liking to him. Soon, she and Bastien are thick as thieves, going to parties with older kids and sneaking around.
Everything about the budding connection between Chloé and Bastien feels natural, a credit both to Le Bon’s screenplay and the authentic portrayals of the cast. That includes the emotional gap caused by the age difference. Bastien is still pretty immature and awkward, and he begins to get a crush on her right away as any boy his age would do. He clams up when older boys are around, making moves on Chloé as if he’s not around. They don’t see him as a romantic rival at all. Why would they? And Chloé is all too eager to play into this. Even at her young age, she’s got enough heartbreak in her past to be cautious, but also to run free.
Shot in mesmerizing 16mm, Falcon Lake balances picturesque summer vibes with the aesthetics of classic slasher movies. It’s a fascinating combination and can shift at a moment’s notice. Eventually, the grim aspects begin to take hold as the story’s full motivation becomes clear, with Le Bon proving in her directorial debut that she’s willing to take bold visual risks. Le Bon occasionally falls into the indie trap of lingering on certain shots for too long, as if by doing so they instantly become meaningful, but for the most part she has already established herself as filmmaker to keep a close watch on. Falcon Lake proves that Le Bon has a courageous spirit behind the camera, and her debut film has a strange beauty that ripples like a rock skipping across the water.
Falcon Lake is open in select theaters now.
The story follows Will Harper (Chris Messina) and his daughters, Sadie (Sophie Thatcher), and Sawyer (Obi-Wan Kenobi‘s wonderful Vivien Lyra Blair) who are in a world of hurt and trying to find their new normal after the sudden death of their wife/mother. Side note, why are the families in these movies always in the midst of a world shattering trauma right before being assaulted by some hellish threat? I get it, trauma breeds trauma, but just once I want to see a REALLY happy, rich, well-off family just be demolished by a demon. Rant over. Will, who works as a therapist our of his home (didn’t this guy watch American Horror Story), sees Lester (the always amazing David Dastmalchian) who is rife with grief after the mysterious death of his three children, death that he’s being blamed for. The problem is, Lester didn’t come to his appointment alone…he brought the Boogeyman, and when Lester closes his session by hanging himself in an upstairs room Mr Boogey is left in need of a new haunt.
As you can probably tell from the synopsis above, the story is light and somewhat basic. It does feel like there was more to say about the families trauma and what they were dealing with. Doing so may have elevated the film past just a scary flick to something memorable but we’re not buying tickets for a character study, we want the scary, right? Savage seems to know that and focuses solely in on it creating an atmosphere of suspense and loading the scares one after another. If you take nothing else away from this it will be that Rob Savage knows how to engineer a proper jump scare. So that’s a definite plus, but the most disturbing thing about the movie to me, and this seems to be a growing trend, is that the film isn’t scared to put kids in danger. There was a time when Jason Voorhes could commit mass murder but as long as you were under the age of 14 you were safe. I won’t go into any spoilers but there are plenty of points in this film where you wonder just how far they’ll go.
