If Sombre is a fairy tale inside a horror film and New Life a modern myth about a trip to the underworld, A Lake has the profound simplicity of a folk tale. A family of woodcutters lives in an isolated cabin in the mountains until one day a young stranger arrives who is the same age as the two oldest children in the family. The calm and quiet of A Lake is just as radical as the audiovisual assault of Grandrieux’s first two films, with a number of extreme close-ups used to capture the intense tenderness of lives lived with much unsaid, but not unexpressed. The precursors of such cinematic attention to affect are Murnau, Dreyer, Bresson and Tarkovsky, but the use of light and shadow, sound and silence is uniquely Grandrieux.

Grandrieux’s first feature film follows a solitary traveling puppeteer who is also a brutal serial killer. The title refers to the darkness out of which the film’s events emerge and to which they return in a series of images where often the main action seems to take place offscreen, or perhaps between the shots. The narrative really begins when the killer meets a pair of sisters who are almost allegorically matched - dark and blond, sexual and virginal - an encounter which balances on the knife’s edge between the suspense of the horror film and an almost fairy tale belief in magical transformation.  In either case, the characters of Sombre can’t be judged by standards of verisimilitude but are rather at the mercy of their drives, both attracted to and repulsed by the sexuality of violence and the violence of sexuality.