L’étranger [The Stranger] *** (2025, Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin, Swann Arlaud, Denis Lavant) – Classic Movie Review 13,900

François Ozon’s 2025 French drama film L’étranger [The Stranger] is an exceptional looking, stylish, arty literary adaptation, unsettling and elusive, exactly as planned.

In 1930s French Algeria, the daily life of a detached and indifferent young Frenchman called Meursault is shaken by the death of his mother, and having to attend her funeral, and a fateful encounter on a beach when he shoots dead an Arab lying there with a knife in his hand.

Meursault starts up an affair with Marie Cardona (Rebecca Marder), who wants to marry him. He agrees but couldn’t care one way or another. Meursault’s sad old neighbour Salamano (Denis Lavant) beats his dog, which he loves, and misses after it suddenly vanishes.

Meursault’s friend Raymond Sintès (Pierre Lottin) beats his girlfriend, whom he loves, and her male relatives start to stalk and menace them. Meursault ends up on trial for capital murder after shooting one of them several times. A Priest (Swann Arlaud) comes to save Meursault’s soul, but he isn’t having any.

Director François Ozon’s 2025 French drama film L’étranger [The Stranger] is an exceptional looking, stylish, arty literary adaptation, unsettling and elusive, exactly as planned. François Ozon’s screenplay adapts Algerian-French author Albert Camus’s 1942 masterwork novella The Stranger, a landmark work of existentialism. Camus and cinema are uneasy bedfellows.

The film has a glorious visual style. The black and white photography is extremely striking. For all the good work, it is none too engaging or involving, though that certainly may well be the point. It’s quite a downer, actually, and hard to sit through for two hours of misery. Benjamin Voisin is effective as the central character, a difficult role to play as the character is infuriatingly disconnected with everyone around him and his fate. He’s truthful, but that’s lethal.

Quite a lot happens, some major events, some little irrelevant things, yet nothing happens at all. Life goes on and then it finishes. Full stop. It is, however, a good film of a virtually impossible-to-film, plotless book, made with loving care by a 100 per cent committed François Ozon, using all his film craftsmanship and powers.

It remakes Luchino Visconti’s 1967 film Lo straniero [The Stranger], starring Marcello Mastroianni as Meursault.

Release date: 2 September 2025 (Venice International Film Festival) and 29 October 2025 (France).

Director: François Ozon Story by: Albert Camus Screenplay: François Ozon

Stars Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin

Running time: 2h 3m.

Benjamin Voisin starred in François Ozon’s 2020 drama film Summer of 85.

L’Étranger is not really The Stranger at all. L’Étranger (literally The Foreigner) was published in English as The Outsider.

© Derek Winnert 2026 – Classic Movie Review 13,900

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