Coming-of-age stories can be very hit-or-miss for me. In my experience, capturing the rigors of childhood and adolescence is an area where filmmakers rarely excel at, as they fail to truly convey the terrifying exhilaration that comes with making new friends, falling in love, or embarrassing yourself in front of the very people you’re trying to impress. Instead of showing us how these milestones actually feel, they end up portraying how they think they’re supposed to feel. It’s as if they’re misremembering their own experiences or somehow filtering them through similar cinematic stories they’ve already consumed. It’s kind of like when you watch a movie that’s supposed to look like high school but all the actors are in their late 20s. For me, that’s never been very relatable, regardless of how well-acted or funny the movie is.
But, of course, there are exceptions. Bo Burnham’s endlessly uncomfortable Eighth Grade comes to mind, and now too will Charlotte Le Bon’s Falcon Lake, a film that not only, better than most, captures all the frustrating emotions of uncomfortably maturing into a full-blown teenager (and all the confusing hormones that come with that), but also happens to be a damned creepy ghost story.
With clever uses of foreshadowing, misdirection, and beautiful, if unsettling, imagery, Le Bon walks us through the story of 13-year-old Bastien (Joseph Engel) as his family vacations at a lake house in Quebec. While there, he meets and becomes enamored with an older 16-year-old named Chloé (Sara Montpetit), whose morbid tales of ghosts and haunted lakes fascinate him almost as much as her veiled flirting. The two become fast friends, but Chloé’s outgoing nature and slightly more mature standing with some of the other older boys cause Bastien no shortage of minor heartbreak. However, the fact that Chloé even gives him the time of day is more than enough for a boy who has just met the girl of his dreams. For a time, anyway.
As the pair pass their summer days and nights away, Le Bon continuously hints at disaster by using wide shots of what appear to be the bodies of children in various states and modes of death. The images, while not graphic, resemble old crime scene photos that conjure up the kind of ethereal “wrongness” often associated with disturbing dreams. However, despite the grisly nature of their subject matter, these images radiate a strange tranquility that gets under the skin and stays there for a while, much in the same way Chloé’s obsession with ghost stories does.
This spectral imagery, the ups and downs of Bastien and Chloé’s relationship, and the macabre foreboding that blankets everything that happens all add up to complete a coming-of-age story that is truly unique in both how it portrays the confusion of first loves and the overall uncertainty of how and when its more ghastly aspects will come to pass. This is a film dripping with atmosphere, but also one with a very strong and relatable core that allows for plenty of room for that atmosphere to rear its often ominous head.
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.