‘Falcon Lake’ Review: A Weird, Wistful Coming-of-Age Debut That Is Equally Charming and Chilling
variety.comJessica Kiang There’s a reason so many horror films — specifically the classic slashers of the ’70s and ’80s — make teenagers their imperiled protagonists.
It makes for fun, squirmy viewing to see the relatable vulnerabilities of that age, with its fumbling sexual encounters and peer-pressure anxieties, sliced open by whichever knife-wielding maniac or mask-wearing ghoul happens to be lumbering about.
But Charlotte Le Bon’s striking, stylish, sweetly scary debut reverses the polarity, putting the wittily observed tale of a teenage crush front and center of a ghoul-free horror film, where all that goes bump in the night is an embarrassed kid trying to clean his sheets after a wet dream.
Coming-of-age movies are usually, like growing up itself, some combination of funny, sad, rueful, awkward or frightening, but rarely are they so successfully all those things at once as in “Falcon Lake.” This ambitious yet nimbly assured tonal mash-up is introduced in the opening shot, in which a girl’s body floats face down in a placid, forest-fringed lake, while the film’s title inscribes itself, in inkblot-parchment Gothic lettering, across the landscape.
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