HE GAY - SHE CRAY

This movie is phenomenal. It merges so many different emotions and situations so quickly in succession that one occasional experiences emotional whiplash. And the way in which the story unfolds, presenting important details as a narrative out of time order, means it's perpetually building towards a resolution.

****WARNING****There Will Be Spoilers****

But most importantly--Luc's gay.

He's never had sex, experiences uncomfortable emotions with Saïd, and gazes longingly at him with his loamy loins--he's obviously confused about his sexuality.

She's a pathological liar who literally gets aroused by physical violence... I grant you, it's not cinema's most redeeming depictions of a woman (the only woman in the film...) however, it really helps motivate the plot.
Alice is crazy. Her excuse to kill a boy was that he wanted to have sex with her, yet she scorns her impotent lover immensely, to the point of motivating him to commit murder out of "love".
And just in case her descriptions in her journal entries, or the arousal she experienced watching Saïd die didn't convince you, she literally has a sex dream of her boyfriend being choked to death--it's a wet dream she has while sleeping in a pit! She's literally humping a tree!!

Enter: L'homme de forêt
I certainly understand the inclination to tie up Jérémie Renier... The Man in the Forest is more complex than your basic fairytale-esque character/foil, however. For the sexually-confused Luc he acts as the wise-janitor or, more accurately, Stifler's mom from some "American Pie" sequel. This guy is literally a bondage-daddy. He teaches Luc, who is previously impotent 100% of the time with Alice, how to be intimate with another person. It definitely looks strange on film, but even during the man-on-boy-sex-sequence he isn't raping the kid, they're are actually having consensual anal sex....after all, it IS France! Their relationship builds, this man treats him well (especially by comparison), Alice is left in a pit with a body that doesn't decompose, there's some questionable-but-probable cannibalism, and basically every time Luc helps Alice his life gets somehow worse.

It's touching when he's defending his kidnapper/rapist from the back of the cop van at the very end.
(And Alice gets her just desserts, that bitch...)

And Luc will be great at receiving anal sex in prison, which we all know they saved for the sequel!!