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If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.

dakotadanger

Stranger by the Lake (2013) is a thriller, or maybe horror, about a nude beach where gay men meet to hook up. It’s a cruising spot. Franck is looking for sex, but really he’s craving an intimate relationship that exists away from the beach. He witnesses a murder by drowning, and finds himself falling in love with the killer.

This film was in the “Queer Horror” collection on Shudder. I wasn’t really engaged by it because I wanted/expected more horror. I couldn’t understand why the protagonist was making himself so vulnerable to the person he knew was a murderer. There’s also a lot of unsimulated sex, which was unexpected.

This film makes a lot more sense through the lens of a drama or thriller. Franck is so desperate for real love that he’s willing to forget about witnessing a murder. Despite all of the sex, the men at the beach are actually quite lonely. It feels like a comment on hookup culture or cruising specifically.

The ambiguous ending sucks.