Being and nothingness: "The Stranger"

There's a new François Ozon; there usually is. Yet after a decade or so of middling period pieces and familial melodramas, one senses this one might mean a little more in the long run, and demand more from its maker than merely converting France's apparently infinite public funding for cinema into middlebrow festival fare. In adapting The Stranger this far into the 21st century, Ozon has set himself a proper challenge: translating the colonial-era concerns of Camus' 1942 novel, revered touchstone of post-War existentialism, for a post-colonial audience who've long sensed existentialism was just a phase our polonecked predecessors felt they had to go through. Perhaps wisely, the writer-director adopts a double-jointed approach. With one hand, he ensures this narrative looks like a thing of the past, filming the novel's Algiers setting in a lush monochrome, high-contrast blacks and whites bookending suggestive shades of grey; the choice allows this Stranger to mesh both with the Casablanca of Casablanca and the Algiers of The Battle of Algiers, to exist on a timeline somewhere between the early 1940s and the late 1960s. (Some part of Ozon has elected to make the movie the French film industry would have made not long after the book became the literary sensation it did.) With the other hand, though, Ozon gives his material a rigorous, modernising tweak, maintaining Camus' focus on the mopey Meursault (played here by emergent star Benjamin Voisin) while also fleshing out those Arab characters he encounters and finally takes up arms against.

In suspending the action between two states of being, two moments in time, Ozon preserves a certain strangeness essential to Camus's book: what we're watching feels like a dream - then a nightmare - unfolding under the blazing noonday sun, which might be as good a definition as any of the whole colonial project. Working closely with cinematographer Manu Dacosse - better known for his striking horror/fantasy endeavours (2015's Evolution, 2025's Reflections in a Dead Diamond) - Ozon affords his typically considered and handsome images a new, uncanny twist, positioning most of these set-ups somewhere between 1950s Buñuel, Welles's Kafka and de Chirico's etchings. We notice, because - after a run of chatty Ozon tales - this one is told chiefly through images, the most lingering of which is the blankness of Voisin's face. It's one of those performances that shouldn't work - where a director has clearly told an actor to do less and less, until he's finally seen to do all but nothing - and yet it's one that grows only more effective (and troubling) by the frame: a facade hiding very little. This Meursault, less obviously heroic than Camus's, is a wastrel, a benumbed observer who lets slip the odd shudder of horniness (in a relationship with Rebecca Marder's Marie, which he blows) but otherwise betrays no fellow feeling, no empathy, merely a cruel indifference to the world around him. He is, in Ozon's eyes, pure white privilege, a walking critique of every role Tom Hiddleston has played over the last decade and a half; he's an enigma to be puzzled over if not ultimately figured out (there may be nothing there; there may be nothing there but self-interest), yet no more an enigma than the colonial mindset that inspires certain states to try and lord it over others.

He also presents as one risk among the many Ozon forces himself to take here: a protagonist who's a decidedly odd and cold and slippery fish, who probably shouldn't be the hero of a motion picture. (For starters, Meursault doesn't act, he shrugs; he shrugs his way into a courtroom where, even with the advantage of time and perspective, nobody can quite explain the events to which we've all borne witness.) Ozon keeps his Meursault front and centre so as to keep an eye on him; it's an example of a director tracking a character he knows we cannot trust. But he also doesn't blind himself to the flickers of actual life around this void: the vivacious Marder, with increasingly poignant hope in her eyes; Denis Lavant as Meursault's scrofulous, dog-beating neighbour Salamano, who proves preferable company to Meursault, in that he at least misses the dog after it's gone; Algiers itself, a far livelier destination than its overlords would prefer; and Hajar Bouzaouit as the drained, exhausted sister of the Arab Meursault kills (in a scene Ozon frames as almost a cruising-ground encounter gone bad; is Meursault a stranger even to his own sexuality?), who has good reason to feel numb. Mostly, this Stranger stays at Meursault's shoulder, not to exalt him, but to detail, in as much as any camera can, his fetid, cowardly, nihilistic and finally deadly worldview. It's that rare film adaptation of a tricky text that doesn't in the least shy away from what's prickly, difficult, perhaps alienating about its source; it may, in fact, be at least as much critique as straightforward adaptation, as though someone had refilmed The Fountainhead with a pompous, egotistical jerk of a hero whose architectural dickswinging fouls up multiple city skylines. It is the work of Ozon the enfant terrible who wanted to shake up and scatter the bourgeois audience's assumptions, but also that of the worldly, professorial figure Ozon cuts today, who spies the dangers inherent in youthful posethrowing. It is, finally, a L'Étranger for grown-ups, and not the mooning hipsters and adolescents who've historically taken this book and its worldview to their hearts. If that makes Ozon's film hard to like or embrace especially, I also doubt we'll see a more admirable adaptation in 2026.

The Stranger is now playing in selected cinemas.