There’s a chameleonic high quality to François Ozon; in contrast to many auteurs, he doesn’t merely remake the identical movie in several guises. The cool, voyeuristic gaze of Charlotte Rampling within the psychosexual thriller “Swimming Pool” is nothing just like the Catherine Denueve-led musical “8 Ladies,” simply because the slippery, nesting doll of tales “Within the Home” is a world away from the camp and kinky erotic thriller “L’Amant Double.”
Cohering his physique of labor is a non-judgmental curiosity about socially transgressive habits and a aptitude for capturing the physique warmth of sexuality. In bringing Albert Camus’ absurdist 1942 novella “The Stranger” to the display, Ozon harnesses an embodied, erotic aspect of the story, which is kind of a flex contemplating that the ebook is famed for that includes a protagonist so indifferent that it prices him the whole lot.
Which isn’t to say that this can be a subversive rewrite of the textual content. The important thing adjustments contain bringing out the person humanity and political turmoil of the native Algerian characters, described by the ebook’s first-person narrator uniformly as “The Arab/s.” Save for barely fleshing out a few of these roles, Ozon’s script is loyal to the purpose of lifting most strains of dialogue verbatim. Not that the taciturn protagonist has a lot to say: “I don’t know” is his favourite reply.
Like Camus, the protagonist, Meursault (Benjamin Voisin from “Summer season of ‘85”) is a French-Algerian dwelling in Algeria in the course of the time of indigénat, a code imposed by French colonial rule that gave the indigenous inhabitants inferior authorized standing and harsher punishments. Ozon swiftly conveys the underlying battle with an establishing shot of graffiti that reads “Algerian Liberation Entrance” after which one other of activists advocating for the French language.
This isn’t the sort of wrestle that Meursault is more likely to concern himself with. He’s a neatly contained presence, exhibiting no response to opening a telegram that reads: “MOTHER DECEASED, BURIAL TOMORROW.” Filmed in lush, Bressonian black-and-white by director of pictures Manuel Dacosse, Voisin instructions the digicam’s gaze, at the same time as his personal stays opaque. He smokes like a chimney, sweeping butt after butt to rosebud lips earlier than stubbing them out with extra vitality than he’ll use till his subsequent cigarette. His hair (generally slicked again, generally with a forelock shaken free) is essentially the most dynamic facet of his persona. Shaving is a ritual too. He capably enacts the routines of life, it’s within the enviornment of social efficiency that he — a budding Bartleby — would like to not.
Nonetheless, Meursault travels by means of the sweaty, stultifying warmth to the remainder house the place his mom handed away and carries off the required dying duties, albeit with out shedding a tear. The subsequent day, on the baths in his hometown, he runs right into a younger typist he used to know named Marie (Rebecca Marder). The attraction is immediate. They dive into the water and swim to a float the place he rests his head on her physique they usually lie, lazily entangled, in a state of sun-drunk near-nudity. Intercourse and dying are twins, in spite of everything.
As soon as dressed, she notices his black armband and affords condolences. He doesn’t miss a beat earlier than taking her to the cinema. They fall right into a relationship. And on this a part of his life, ardour burns brightly. Nearer to house, individuals’s feelings are unrulier. Meursault shares his condominium block with neighbors that embrace a shambling outdated man Salamano (Denis Lavant), vulnerable to yelling at and beating the canine he loves greater than something. Then there’s Raymond Sintès (Pierre Lottin) whose violent relationship along with his girlfriend, Djemila, units in movement the occasions that come to outline “The Stranger.”
The query of why our protagonist agrees to assist Raymond on this scheme is given house to linger — is it as a result of Raymond buys him with foods and drinks? Is it as a result of “Arabs” “don’t depend”? Psychological motive issues lower than the sequence of causal occasions within the anaesthetized ambiance of “The Stranger” and as a substitute the thriller exists by itself phrases.
Meursault is something however rash. At any time when requested to do something, he pauses to suppose. He’s comfy saying no. But he says sure when Raymond asks him to put in writing Djemila a letter luring her to his flat, the place he plans to manage punishment. The 2 turn out to be nearer and Meursault — with out significantly liking the person — is drawn right into a rivalry between the virulently racist Raymond and Djemila’s brother and associates, who pursue revenge in her title.
Camus’ slim novel is wedded to Meursault’s point-of-view and he’s framed as a person in the end condemned by his failure to appropriately carry out grief, with the broader social implications of his character left to the reader to unpack. Ozon (with a household historical past that leads again to French colonial Algeria) does a few of that unpacking so the character is subtly reweighted, with the social position he chooses to occupy which means as a lot as the results of his jarring mode of expression.
The early presentation of the movie is as modern and charged as a cat on a phone wire. Crisp black-and-white visuals of a really photogenic, very unusual man are scored by Kuwaiti musician Fatima Al Qadiri’s eerie music, and even in case you haven’t learn the ebook, the sense is that this is not going to finish properly. The interval recreation of ’30s Algiers is shot although with class, and there’s a fetishistic consideration to the great thing about faces, locations and issues. In the meantime, Voisin provides a cerebral efficiency of a person who occupies and contributes to a thrillingly tactile house whereas his antennae are attuned to a different realm totally.
The state of alienation that permeates and infuses Camus’ prose is the lacking ingredient right here and, with out it, Meursault cuts a really completely different determine — much less adrift in ennui and extra deliberately nihilistic. As Ozon has it, he’s a sexy and very important loner whose impulsive act of violence is pre-empted by a second of erotic transference. Its aftermath places him right into a authorized system that, per his lawyer, wouldn’t fault him for what he did to an Arab, however his earlier failure to cry at his mom’s funeral? Prison.
Ozon succeeds at drumming up at a heady ambiance infused by the expectations of white supremacy and neurotypicality and — second by second — there are particulars to feast upon. Swann Arlaud from “Anatomy of a Fall” reveals up as a priest who unlocks extra phrases in ten minutes than Mersault has spoken in the results of the movie put-together. This character growth does not likely land, nonetheless, and Mersault turns into more and more hazy, disappearing right into a cloud of abstraction within the third act.
The extent of craft current in creating the temper is transfixing and the movie works as a fever dream set within the tail-end of French colonial rule. However as an express adaption of the ebook by a thoughts within the means of birthing existentialism, it doesn’t fairly have the requisite braveness or — dare I say it — strangeness.
Grade: B-
“The Stranger” premiered on the 2025 Venice Movie Competition. It’s at present in search of U.S. distribution.
Need to keep updated on IndieWire’s movie opinions and demanding ideas? Subscribe right here to our newly launched e-newsletter, In Overview by David Ehrlich, by which our Chief Movie Critic and Head Evaluations Editor rounds up the most effective new opinions and streaming picks together with some unique musings — all solely accessible to subscribers.