THE STRANGER Review

There are books you read once and carry forever, lodged somewhere between the ribs. Albert Camus' The Stranger was that book for us, the one that arrived at exactly the right age when the world felt arbitrary and grief felt impossible to perform on cue. Meursault was not a villain. He was just a man who could not make his insides match what the outside demanded. We understood him completely. We were young. The sun had never tried to kill anyone we knew. And yet.

So when François Ozon, one of French cinema's most restless and shapeshifting minds, announced he was adapting the novella, we felt that particular mixture of hope and dread that only a beloved book can produce. The result is a film of genuine beauty and serious intelligence that falls, in the end, just short of the strangeness it needs most.

Ozon does not simply remake the same film in different guises. He arrives at each story like a new country, curious and unafraid.

The key decision here is both brave and correct. Camus wrote the indigenous Algerian characters as faceless, referred to only as "the Arabs," their humanity subordinated entirely to Meursault's detached gaze. Ozon, whose own family history threads back to French colonial Algeria, refuses that erasure. He gives these figures names, faces, grief of their own. The colonial scaffolding of indigénat, that brutal legal code which made Algerian lives worth less under French rule, is present from the first frames. Graffiti on a wall. A crowd arguing over language. The political temperature of a society on the edge of its own reckoning.

This is the film's most important contribution and its most quietly radical act. It does not rewrite Camus so much as it reads him more honestly, restoring the context the original prose allowed to recede into the background. For that alone, Ozon deserves credit.

Benjamin Voisin, who broke through in Ozon's own Summer of '85, carries the film on a face that gives almost nothing away. He smokes with more conviction than he speaks. He pauses before answering every question, not from stupidity but from a genuine uncertainty about whether the answer matters. Manuel Dacosse shoots him in lush black-and-white that makes colonial Algiers look like a fever remembered after the fact, all heat and shadow and the ache of things that cannot be taken back.

The early sections are transfixing. There is a scene at the beach, Meursault and Marie (a warm and luminous Rebecca Marder) drifting in the water, bodies half-submerged, the sun pressing down on everything. Sex and death are twins, the film seems to say. The world is sensory and indifferent and beautiful and it will not explain itself to you. In these moments, Ozon is at the top of his considerable craft.

The period recreation of thirties Algiers is shot through with elegance. And then, quietly, something starts to slip.

What slips is the ennui. Camus' prose is saturated with it, that famous Meursaultian detachment that is not coldness exactly but a kind of radical honesty about the absurdity of all human performance. On the page it is suffocating in the best way, a philosophical atmosphere you breathe whether you want to or not. On screen, filtered through Ozon's more embodied and erotic instincts, Meursault becomes something slightly different: less a man adrift in the void and more a handsome nihilist making a series of interesting choices. It is a compelling figure. It is not quite the right one.

The third act, where the legal machinery grinds Meursault down for failing to cry at his mother's funeral rather than for what he did to an Arab man, loses its grip precisely when it should be tightening. Swann Arlaud arrives as a priest and briefly jolts the film back to life, drawing more words from Meursault in ten minutes than the rest of the film combined. But the landing does not hold. Meursault fades into abstraction at the very moment Camus meant him to blaze most clearly.

We left the theater with the memory of beautiful images and the mild melancholy of a film that almost broke through to something essential. Ozon is too intelligent a filmmaker to have failed, and too safe a one, this time, to have fully succeeded. The Stranger is a fever dream of colonial unease, gorgeously photographed and seriously intended. What it lacks is the courage, or perhaps the necessary recklessness, to be as strange as the story demands.

Camus understood that the most terrifying thing about Meursault was not his violence but his honesty: the way he refused to dress his interior life in the costumes society required. A film adaptation of that story must itself be willing to go unadorned. This one is too beautifully dressed to quite get there.

🍿 SCORE = 68/100