The Stranger

The most crucial thing that Ozon’s film gets right are the moral, indeed philosophical considerations that build its central character.

Confounding, disturbing and yet icily compelling, the experience of watching François Ozon’s The Stranger is not entirely dissimilar to that of reading Albert Camus’ 1942 classic.

One of Ozon’s richest and most satisfying works in years — that rarest of literary adaptations, one that honors a foundational text precisely by finding something new to say.

Camus’ formidable antihero may be lost to his own demons, as well as to the demons of colonialism, but Ozon boldly suggests that the memory of his Algerian victim may live on as a harbinger of what’s to come — that is, of a time when rebels like Meursault no longer exist, in a country finally free of them.

Francois Ozon’s adaptation is at its best when it sticks to the letter and tone of Camus’ enduring, enigmatic novella.

The level of craft present in creating the mood is transfixing and the film works as a fever dream set in the tail-end of French colonial rule. But as an explicit adaption of the book by a mind in the process of birthing existentialism, it does not quite have the requisite courage or — dare I say it — strangeness.

The Stranger is a distancing, cold watch that’s sure to leave many viewers feeling completely stranded, which just may be what Ozon is going for.