THE STRANGER
- Colin Fraser
- Apr 16
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 21
FOUR AND A HALF STARS A young man in colonial Algeria is a stranger to everyone who knows him.
DRAMA FRANCE French #THESTRANGER Starring Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder
With THE STRANGER, director Francois Ozon doesn’t simply revisit Albert Camus’s famously cool slab of existentialism, he turns into something pared back, distilled, faintly accusatory. The result is a film of icy assurance and unnerving beauty, one that feels philosophically aligned.
The broad strokes will be familiar to readers of the novella, though Ozon treats them less as plot than as inevitability. Meursault (a superb Benjamin Voisin) drifts through colonial Algeria with all the emotional engagement of a man waiting for a bus with an emotional temperature hovering just slightly above inert. His mother dies; he attends the funeral with a disconcerting lack of performative grief; he begins a relationship with Marie that he clearly doesn’t care about; he falls in with a dubious acquaintance for no better reason that it just is; and, under the merciless North African sun, he commits a senseless murder. It’s less a crime of passion than a crime of atmospheric inconvenience. From there, society takes a sudden, vindictive interest in a man it had previously ignored.
What Ozon understands (perhaps better than most who’ve tried) is that Camus’ novel isn’t about why anything happens, but about the terrifying irrelevance of that question. This is existential nihilism not as a lecture, but as atmosphere; thick, inescapable, and oddly seductive. The film’s silvery tonal palette is key: a wash of burnished light and soft shadow that renders Algeria both tactile and abstract. It’s visually sumptuous without tipping into indulgence, a carefully calibrated elegance that mirrors the period setting while quietly amplifying an integral sense of dislocation. Everything looks exquisite; nothing feels anchored.
And then there’s Voisin, who performs the near-impossible trick of making blankness compelling. His Meursault isn’t robotic, nor is he coded as secretly emotional; instead, he’s disconcertingly complete in his detachment. The ultimate blank canvas. It’s a performance of surfaces - sunlight on skin, cigarette smoke in still air, a thumb scrub of lip that echoes Belmondo. Voisin is a study in presence without participation, and he's consistently compelling. And despite his Meursault being an incredibly ephemeral character, it's impossible to keep your eyes off him.
As the narrative tightens into its second half - trial, condemnation, the slow machinery of moral outrage grinding into motion - Ozon sharpens his blade. The developing plot becomes less about the murder than about Meursault’s failure to play along: his refusal to feign grief, to invent remorse, to flatter the social fiction that everything must mean something. The court recoils not at the act, but at the absence of performance. In that sense, the film becomes quietly, devastatingly ironic: a society horrified not by violence, but by emotional honesty.
That this stands among Ozon’s best work is saying something. From THE SWIMMING POOL to EIGHT WOMEN he’s long demonstrated range and precision, but here he achieves an astonishing clarity of purpose. THE STRANGER is exceptional, controlled, elegant, and and just a little bit cruel. Camus, if he cared, would have loved it.
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