While Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac sees carnality as the glummest of purgatories, French director Alain Guiraudie makes sex more alluringly dangerous, depicting it as both paradise and perdition. Guiraudie has been making wildly idiosyncratic gay-themed films since the early 90s, often set in an imaginary neo-mediaeval Provence, where portly elderly men tend to be the hottest love objects around.

His new film is more conventional only in that Guiraudie has purged the overt goofiness. Stranger By the Lake is a gay art-cinema suspense story, set over 10 days on the sun-kissed, pine-forested banks of a lake – a cruising ground where men can work on their tans in between torrid tussles in the shrubbery. There, Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) strikes up a friendship with a seemingly asexual, portly loner (Patrick d'Assumçao), and finds himself falling hard for Michel (Christophe Paou), a sporty hunk whose retro moustache recalls swimming champ Mark Spitz (or, if you really must, Tom Selleck). But where love creeps in, so does death, and when Franck sees Michel drown another man, he finds himself in the age-old situation evoked in the tagline of Hitchcock's Spellbound: "Will he kiss me… or kill me?"

Rigorously crafted and beautifully shot, the film could be read as an Aids allegory (although the script warns us against such over-simplification) or as a more general disquisition on desire and death. However you read it, the film is compelling and audaciously candid in its erotic charge, while an ending that literally leaves us in the dark is one of the most haunting sign-offs in recent cinema.