Dir: Francois Ozon | France 2025 112’
Reviewed by Peter Herbert
THE STRANGER is amongst French auteur Francois Ozon’s most uncompromising work, embracing the demands of a literary French classic with the intensity of a filmmaker’s personal obsessions and vision.
Albert Camus’ L’Etranger was first published in 1942 and has been filmed once by Luchino Visconti in 1967 with an unrealised version planned by Ingmar Bergman. Comparison with the Visconti version is worth noting as Ozon has stripped away the colour camerawork of Visconti for more evocative use of muted tones of black and white previously used by Ozon in Frantz 2016. This accentuates the occasionally surreal interior first person dream-like monologue of the central character Meursault.
Casting is important: Visconti wanted the younger Alain Delon to play Meursault alongside Anna Karina as a doomed saviour of love but was required to settle for the older actor Marcello Mastrionni providing a more muted world-weary tone. Ozon’s decision to cast a younger actor strikes the right tone and Benjamin Voisin provides a breakthrough performance of depth and range after his 2020 debut for Ozon as a love-struck extrovert teenager in Summer of 85. Voisin also held together the expansive scale of a TV series Careme in 2025 playing a cocky head chef in the court of Bonaparte.
Voisin takes centre stage in The Stranger and Ozon’s camera relishes the actor’s quiet withdrawn calm which is less an acted performance and more a cypher around which is built a visual canvas. Ozon films his often near naked body with a fetish eye for masculine beauty that will explode for real under the glare of the sun during a surreal homoerotic and Bunuelian murder scene.
The expressionist dream of an execution on a hill top has the visual power of the great masters Bergman and Bunuel while the setting of a coastal beach and soothing redemptive power of water continues to fascinate the filmmaker as in Under The Sand2000, Water Drips on Burning Rocks 2000 and Swimming Pool 2003.
Ozon is faithful to the narrative of Camus involving a young man who faces judgment for what is perceived by others as the detached and senseless killing of an Arab. The death of his mother and how Meursault responds reveals Ozon’s sensitive skill with actors.
There are complex emotions on display here that his preceding film When Autumn Falls 2024 may have prepared for in relation to themes of alienation and detachment. He also opens up several subsidiary characters including the sister of the murdered man and a foreboding outsider played by Denis Lavant adding forms of commentary on Meursault’s behaviour and visual depth to Ozon’s expansion of Camus story
The context of racism associated with the French colonisation of Algeria during the 1930s is weaved into the killing and the aftermath for which Meursault accepts there will be a price to pay for his right to live life on his own terms without playing the rules of the game. Voisin provides tenacity and gravity in the final scenes rejecting the saving graces of love and religion.
The Stranger provides thematic links to both Time to Leave (2005) and Franz with issues of familial relationships often involving mothers and sons. Ozon’s eclectic film and musical references include a clip of Fernandel in Marcel Pagnol’s Le Schpountz (1938) and the bold use of Killing an Arab by The Cure during the final credits both seamlessly integrated into the structure of the film.,
Ozon’s career appears to summersault through different genres including both elegant and melancholy character studies, bold colour melodramas, light comic fluff and Grimm fairy tales. The Stranger confirms a key French filmmaker with another of his strongest and most profound films within a provocative and challenging body of filmmaking. @ Peter Herbert
LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2025 | Venice world Premiere 2025