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.

Just after the funeral, 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.

[Spoiler alert] Meursault’s friend Raymond Sintès (Pierre Lottin) beats his Arab girlfriend, whom he loves, and then her young male relatives start to stalk and menace Meursault and Raymond. Meursault ends up on trial for capital murder after shooting one of the Arab men several times. A Priest (Swann Arlaud) comes to save Meursault’s soul, but he isn’t having any. Meursault is condemned to death body and soul. He manages to push the persistent Priest away with some passion, but otherwise he doesn’t care.

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, quite dazzling, with brilliant period production designs. 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. The mother dies, the ‘hero’ dies, life is bad. 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. L’étranger 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 very considerable film craftsmanship and powers. Maybe, on reflection, it’s about the best film you could make of this book.

Why has Meursault killed the Arab boy? Good question. He has been aroused out of his usual habitual indifference and lethargy by the sight of the group of Arab men. He’s not afraid when they come to attack him and Sintès. Instead, he is aroused and sets off with Sintès’s gun to find them. But he finds only one of them, lying passively on the beach. Then he is really aroused by the physicality of the young man, who draws a knife that flashes and gleams in the glare of the strong Algerian sun. Meursault counters with his gun, shooting the boy once in the stomach, pausing, then firing off four more shots. It’s all very symbolic and sexual. François Ozon handles it subtly. It is the closest thing to passion in the film. The outsider Meursault comes outside himself for once in this one mad moment, a moment that he doesn’t want to deny in court and will lead to his death.

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

It remakes Luchino Visconti’s 1967 film Lo straniero [The Stranger], starring Marcello Mastroianni as Meursault. Visconti’s film is in Technciolor in an era still often of black and white, whereas Ozon’s film is in black and white in an era of colour.

It ends (jarringly) with ‘Killing an Arab’, the 1978 debut single by the Cure, described by lead vocalist, guitarist, primary songwriter Robert Smith as ‘a short, poetic attempt at condensing my impression of the key moments in L’étranger’.

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.

© Derek Winnert 2026 – Classic Movie Review 13,900

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com