Review: ‘The Stranger’
2025 / Dir. François Ozon
☆ 3/5
Watch if you like: reliving your high school existentialist phase after reading Albert Camus’s 1942 novel The Stranger in English class.
Contemporary French arthouse mainstay François Ozon plays it straight with his adaptation of the Camus classic, sticking very close to the text in its depiction of an ambivalent Frenchman drifting through life until he murders an Arab man in French colonial Algiers.
What works in a short philosophical text, however, does not make an engaging film, and the first hour in particular can feel endless as we watch Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) stare dead-eyed as he sips coffee and smokes over and over. A straightforward adaptation also makes many of the events feel nonsensical, or characters like the girlfriend, Marie (Rebecca Marder), completely illogical.
What does work and saves The Stranger is the stunning black-and-white cinematography by Manuel Dacosse (Amer, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears). The high-contrast images make the film’s depiction of 1940s Algiers come alive and illuminate themes that the script fails to.