The Stranger (Ozon, 2025)
Every time I review a new François Ozon film, I have to review my past notes to see if I have ever made this comparison out loud. His career and filmography makes me think of Steven Spielberg. One similarity is that like Spielberg in his prime, Ozon puts out new films fairly regularly. He is difficult to pigeon hole stylistically, though perhaps his films have certain themes that reoccur. While he does make the occasional award-bait film (By the Grace of God was my favorite film of 2019), his overall catalog of films is not pretentious, and most of the good will I feel for his body of work comes from the very polished commercial and genre films as opposed to the highbrow stuff.
That may be a roundabout way of explaining how The Stranger could be so polished and accomplished and yet still leave me vaguely disappointed. It leans heavily into the seriousness of Camus’ novel, but it never quite escapes the emotional dullness of existentialism, ultimately feeling more numb than stoic.
The Stranger is readily divided into two parts. In the first, Mersault (Benjamin Voisin) attends his mother’s funeral, engages in a sexual hook up, and kills an Arab man on the beach, all with similar lack of affect. In the second half of the film, that lack of affect is used at his trial to suggest he is some sort of sociopath. He is condemned not because of his crime but because of his attitude, because of his unwillingness to make us feel better by outwardly manifesting the feelings that would make us feel more comfortable. Of course, in the movie, he is also condemned because he is guilty.
I am not one of those literary historians that claims that 9-11 or some other sociopolitical event singnaled the end of postmodernism as an artistic philosophy, but I am sympathetic to the argument that abstract arguments regarding the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life play very differently in times of anxiety and suffering. The black and white cinematography is so beautiful, the casual racism conveyed by the actors so realistic, it became tough for me to see the world that Mersault occupied as indifferent to all human life rather than the product of a system that privileged some over others. While his trial is absurd — witnesses are grilled over who offered who a cigarette — it never engenders the same sympathy or empathy as that of Joseph K. in The Trial. I know, I know, two drastically different narratives. But in a world struggling with renewed justificaitons for imperialism and colonialism, it is tough to embrace the killer of a politically oppressed people group as a protagonist.
There were moments in The Stranger where I felt like I was watching a homage to Robert Bresson. A couple of the shots of handcuffs looked strikingly similar to those in A Man Escaped. A montage of Mesault speaking through bars immediately made me think of Pickpocket. If these were intentional, I could not tell to what purpose. The Transcendental Style (as labeled by Paul Schrader), points often to the unseen spirit that moves where it will. Thematically, The Stranger feels closer to Antonioni’s La Avventura, suggesting not a rich underlying set of spiritual forces guiding and impacting the world but the misery of human existence in its new knowledge that those forces are absent. The beauty of the photography is painful, because it makes us feel . . . something, only to insist that the echoes of our hearbeats, like the vapors of our emotions, will dissipate into a void, rendering them meaningless.
If that makes it sound like my issues are more with Camus (or existentialism) than Ozon, I plead guilty. But Ozon did pick his material, so I think it is fair to ask whether he did so because it suited him and he thought he could bring something to it, or whether he did so beause its pedigree leant a foundation of prestige to an otherwise derivative work of art. The film bagged some strong endorsement while on the festival circuit, so I am very much aware that mine is a minority report. Films like When Fall is Coming or even The Crime is Mine are more commercial on the surface, while offering suprising, unexpected depth. The Stranger, like Frantz, is so committed to being an important film that it never allows you to get lost in its story.
The Stranger begins its American theatrical run at The Lincoln Film Center and Angelika Film Center on April 3, 2026. National distribution will follow, including Los Angeles screenings beging April 10 at Laemmle Royal and Glendale.
