In the opening, the nasal voice-over as much as the old-fashioned newsreel images immediately situate the film. Imprecise situation moreover, it is Algiers in the colonial era in the middle of the 20th centurye century, we could be on the eve of the Second World War, when Albert Camus conceived the project of his first novel, or a little earlier, when Julien Duvivier directed Pepe the Moko (1937), or a few months before the start of the Algerian war of independence in 1954. This uncertainty matters. It defines colonial Algeria – a question which the writer did not think about at the time – as a general state, an active framework of the history to come.
Then the film really begins, with the entry of the pale, blond man into a collective cell where all the other prisoners are Arabs and to whom he says, in the tired obvious tone that characterizes him, that he is there because he has “killed an Arab”. The scene is in the book The Strangerbut it takes place much later. This is one of the rare major modifications made by François Ozon to the unfolding of Meursault’s actions and his way of describing them, which are the subject of one of the most famous novels in the French language (published in 1942).
Rigor and invention of adaptation
It is never, ever essential to ask the question of adaptation regarding a film inspired by a pre-existing text. But it turns out that this question here is fascinating. Which in no way means that it would be essential to the vision of the twenty-fourth feature film by one of the most stimulating filmmakers of his generation.
As such, The Stranger is a moving and mysterious film, of great sensual beauty, to which we can very well be sensitive even if we have never read a line from the author of The Rebel Man (1951) and not caring about what precedes what happens on the screen (and on the soundtrack) during the 122 minutes of the projection.
But this would nevertheless mean losing a significant part of what makes the film an immense success, by unfolding simultaneously on three different registers. The first register is his way of being extremely faithful to what the book tells, of accompanying the characters and the adventures, of explaining the issues at stake.
There will once again be this distant relationship to the existence of the main character, this assumed, claimed incapacity to experience and manifest the affects that the various situations are supposed to inspire in everyone. And this use of words as transparent to the facts, refractory to any sentimental or manipulative coloring.
There will be Marie, the young woman who loves Meursault, who does not love her while desiring her. There will be the two neighbors, the pimp and the old man with the dog (admirable Denis Lavant!). There will be the murder on the beach, the prison, the trial, the confrontation with the chaplain wonderfully played by Swann Arlaud.
In voice-over, Meursault’s interpreter, Benjamin Voisin, says two key passages from the book. These are the sentences which conclude each of its two parts, the one which concerns the famous four brief knocks on the door of misfortune and the implacable final sentence: “For everything to be complete, for me to feel less alone, I just had to hope that there would be many spectators on the day of my execution and that they would welcome me with cries of hatred.”
The present of social control
But if the film accompanies and shares the story and the philosophical fable that Albert Camus actually wrote, it simultaneously does something else. Because it is a film and a film from 2025. Thus, by remaining as close as possible to what the text supported, we find current forms of the subject, which are not limited to the overall meditation on the absurd – a meditation which also remains valid.
Exemplarily, the way in which the reasons for Meursault’s conviction are stated, less for the murder he committed than for his non-respect for social codes, a non-respect crystallized around the fact that he did not cry at his mother’s funeral, resonates with today in a powerful way.
Present in full in the novel, this dimension is reconfigured at a time of social control exercised by all fundamentalisms, at a time of online crucifixion of those who do not play the game as required by instances that are today more multiple and often apparently contradictory, than in the already very conformist era of the novel.
What the film thus suggests, in the present, would be a sort of elevation to the square of what has always been condemned and repressed, the transgression of dominant codes of behavior. This is a very present motif in the work of the author of Water drops on hot stones (2000) and Peter von Kant (2022), whose cinema practice is itself transgressive with respect to all codes, including those of auteur cinema.
A manifestation of this is found in The Stranger with one of the script’s additions to the book, this dreamlike scene on a deserted mountain dominated by a Chinese shadow guillotine, which evokes Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950), as well as B-series fantasy films.
Echoes of colonial oppression
But if it thus echoes contemporary forms of conformist fanaticism, one of the major dimensions of the film’s contribution lies in its way of constantly arousing echoes of a colonial oppression about which Albert Camus was in no way concerned in his novel – even though he was, at the time of writing, personally engaged in the anti-colonialist fight.
The most obvious translation of the shift made by the film is to have given a name to the “Arab” that Meursault will kill (with the first name Moussa, the one that Kamel Daoud attributes to him in Meursault, counter-investigationthe only point of contact between this 2014 book and the 2025 film) and to his sister.
She is no longer “the girl” as with Camus, she has become Djemila (played by Hajar Bouzaouit), who will have – a little – the right to speak and – a lot – a very beautiful presence. Ultimately, the film will take its spectators to the grave of the murdered young man, which is far from being anecdotal, just as it began with the presence of the pale, blond young man among the prisoners, all “natives”, according to the formula then in force.
But there is more, in the way of filming the bodies, the places, the clothes, the food, the inflection of the words of the “Europeans” – all except Meursault, who condemns nothing or no one, nor is he moved by the most odious actions.
This gap between the character and the world, coming from the book and admirably reworked by the film (and which is part of what the very forgettable first adaptation of the book by Luchino Visconti in 1967 failed at) is entirely reconfigured by the third register in which the film takes shape.
Sensual irradiation
It is necessary here, very belatedly as it immediately explodes upon seeing the film, to salute the splendor of the black and white image, very particular and capable of merging what is an archive look and what is akin to a stylization close to expressionism.
The comparison between the black and white of this film and that which François Ozon mobilized in the beautiful Frantz (2016), with which The Stranger
makes certain diptych respects (period film, adaptation, focus on the manifestation or not of feelings), underlines the acuteness of formal choices, then and now.
This time, the intensity of the image is directly in phase with the partly paradoxical sensuality which radiates from the film. Paradoxical since it concerns a man who almost constantly experiences nothing. This intensity concerns the vibrations of lights and shadows, the disturbing power of the sea and the sun, as in the book. But also, very far from the text, the erotic charge of the bodies and the way in which this affects, or contradicts, what the protagonists do.
In the role of Marie, mistress and fiancée, Rebecca Marder is filmed in a way that highlights both the actress and the character, and prevents the obvious desirous attention of the filmmaker and his camera for male bodies from becoming reductive.
But it is in the tension between the quasi-mutism of the character Meursault and the eloquent physical presence of his interpreter, Benjamin Voisin, as filmed, notably in a swimsuit at the beach or naked in bed with Marie, that the central energy of the film burns.
And the overplayed virility of Meursault’s pimp neighbor, but above all the beauty consistent to the point of irony with homo-erotic-exotic fantasies of two young Arab men, the victim of the murder and the boy who helps the novice prisoner, saturate this story of interior confinement which, in the book, had no sensuality other than the excesses of the sun and the sound of the sea.
In itself, a very brief zoom on Moussa’s bare armpit just before he is killed comes to underline the importance of this dimension, which we know configures the entire cinema of François Ozon, even if it would be ridiculous to reduce it to this single theme.
Which is very beautiful with The Stranger –the film– is the way in which these three approaches – the novel in all its narrative and philosophical richness, the colonial fact, erotic emotion – reinforce each other, support and enrich each other. This makes one of the rare great films that French cinema has been capable of this year: a work that is both contemporary and faithful to where it comes from, of great reflective power and of impressive physical, sensory and disturbing beauty.
