If Sombre is a fairy tale inside a horror film and New Life a modern myth about a trip to the underworld, Un lac 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 Un lac 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.