French director François Ozon’s adaptation of Albert Camus’ absurdist novel The Stranger premiered in September 2025 at the Venice International Film Festival and was met with acclaim, eventually garnering a nomination for the festival’s Golden Lion award.
Ozon’s take on the French classic maintains many of the same details as Camus’ book. The audience is still following Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), a young man living in Algiers during the late stages of French colonization of Algeria. Meursault still gets a telegram stating simply that his mother has died. After blankly attending her funeral, Meursault then meets and romances Marie (Rebecca Marder), a young typist at Meursault’s office.
All the while, Meursault and a local pimp named Raymond Sintès (Pierre Lottin) try to ward off a group of Arab men trying to defend the sister of a group member with whom Raymond is having an affair. Ultimately, Meursault murders one of the members of the group after the group and Meursault and his friends get into a fight.
Despite an oeuvre dominated by genre movies, The Stranger is a full-chested swing of an art film by Ozon. Shot entirely in black-and-white, Manuel Dacosse’s cinematography is part and parcel of this swing. Early on, the shots are slow and tracing, reflections bouncing off mirrors and shadows dancing in windows.
As Meursault falls deeper into the his existential—and legal—crisis, the images become darker and people become blobs oozing across the screen. This foggy mood, achieved first with a transition from outdoor shots lit by sun to chiaroscuro lighting, and then second with a vignette in some frames, darkening the outside of the shot, is only aided by the constant barrage of moody cigarette puffs and puckers.
The sections of the film that feel most alive, the most enrapturing, are the sections where the audience gets to simmer in that moodiness. Just like it’s hard for undergrads to read Camus and understand him without a coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, it’s similarly difficult to access ‘the point’ of this film without giving yourself away to the aesthetic.
When the film hastens, it quickly becomes difficult to knit the underlying philosophical theses together. Meursault’s stiff personality is not any aid to this fault. For many audiences, Meursault may be a bit too nonchalant, too detached and cold. I don’t doubt that audiences expecting a heartfelt story about a young man whose mother died will be disappointed, a fact that Ozon may take like a slap on the wrist.
Instead, it takes a detachment similar to Meursault’s to understand that underneath the narrative current of the film lies a political one. Camus, who authored The Stranger as part of a series exploring philosophical ideas, was famously political, and The Stranger can be read—and thus this film can be seen—as an allegory of the harms of colonialism.
Despite centralizing Meursault in the narrative, the film takes those great moments of calm and directs them toward the people impacted by colonial violence, especially those often excluded from traditional narratives. The audience is reminded through lingering details—e.g. bystanders and witnesses appearing in the background of other scenes or a subtle tilt of the camera, literally skewing the perspective—that there are effects of the violence our stories are about and that these effects often reverberate in places most of the world can’t see.
François Ozon’s adaptation of The Stranger, though perhaps overstaying its welcome at times, stands up to its source material and offers a new point of view, one filled with even more of the beautiful complexities that made Camus’ novel so enticing.
The Stranger is now in theaters.
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