The Stranger (François Ozon, 2025)

The Stranger is the prolific François Ozon's 24th feature film—an impressive figure, given that his first full-length movie, the queasy Sitcom, was released just 27 years ago.  Ozon's next feature but one after Sitcom, the slightly less transgressive Water Drops on Burning Rocks, was an adaptation of a play by Bavarian bad boy Rainer Werner Fassbinder—a director who churned out films at a rate that makes Ozon look like Stanley Kubrick.  For his latest feature, Ozon again goes down the road of the literary adaptation, with The Stranger seeing the versatile filmmaker tackle an undisputed classic in the form of Albert Camus' eponymous 1942 novella, which was the first of its revered author's works to be published.

While Ozon has had some success adapting books by writers as varied as Joyce Carol Oates (Double Lover), Ruth Rendell (The New Girlfriend), Aidan Chambers (Summer of 85), and Elizabeth Taylor (Angel), there is the sense here that Ozon has set himself a stiffer challenge as he grapples with the murky existential abyss at the centre of Camus' most famous work.  Happily, Ozon's film of The Stranger is both a resounding success and one of its director's finest achievements.  The Stranger is one of several Ozon features to have been shot by the Belgian cinematographer Manu Dacosse, whose other recent work includes Fabrice du Welz's Maldoror and Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's Reflection in a Dead Diamond.

After Maldoror's rather muted colour palette and Reflection in a Dead Diamond's kaleidoscopic visuals, The Stranger sees Dacosse shooting in crisp black and white—and it seems almost inconceivable that this tale, set in sun-drenched French Algeria, could be presented any other way.  For the main character, Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), is a man drained of all colour, and his indifference to life (and death) leads him to kill an unnamed Arab man.  While his girlfriend Marie (Rebecca Marder) hopes for no worse than a light custodial sentence, Meursault's reaction could be viewed as the ultimate Gallic shrug.  At his trial, he makes little effort to explain the mitigating circumstances that led to his actions.

Late in the film, Swann Arlaud appears as a priest who visits Meursault in his cell.  The prisoner’s nihilistic response to the clergyman’s pleas is all too predictable—but still fascinating.  Yet there’s something slightly off about the scene; it leaves the film feeling a little unbalanced, as though it exists largely to accommodate Arlaud—one of the finest actors of his generation.  One wonders whether a lesser-known performer might have served the film better, with the sequence shortened.  Still, this is of little consequence when the performances are this good.  The Stranger remains a riveting film and a rigorous adaptation—one that sees Ozon cut cleanly to the dark heart of Camus’ knotty, evasive text.

Darren Arnold

Images: Carole Bethuel