A young man’s village homecoming arouses enigmatic passions in this intriguing mystery from the director of Stranger By the Lake

Plenty of film-makers explore the intersection between desire and violence; it’s a recurring theme in the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, for example. But in the films of Stranger By the Lake director Alain Guiraudie, the overlap between the two is so great, it almost feels as if they are one and the same thing.

In this slippery French-language thriller, boyish, floppy-fringed Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns from Toulouse to the village of Saint-Martial for a funeral. His arrival unlocks a gnawing hunger among the villagers: Martine (Catherine Frot), the widow of the dead man, invites Jérémie to stay in her spare room for as long as he chooses, on the understanding that his personal space is hers to invade. Martine’s bullish son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand) is unsettled by Jérémie’s presence, but there’s a menacing intimacy to their half-serious bouts of woodland wrestling.

In UK and Irish cinemas