The Stranger Review: Alienated in Algiers

For those of you who kept a copy of Albert Camus’ 1942 novella L’Étranger around your college apartment to impress fellow students but never actually cracked the spine, it’s not too late to immerse yourself in its subtly revolutionary pages. For those of you that can’t even be bothered with the CliffsNotes, writer/director François Ozon has turned it into a serviceable if not exactly revelatory film of the same name, released in America as The Stranger.

A relative to The Catcher in the Rye without the teenage moodiness, The Stranger similarly centers on the inner life of a young man who cares little for social norms. Here, it’s Meursault (Benjamin Voisin, Lost Illusions): a French office worker in pre-World War II Algeria who leads a quiet, uninteresting life until he shoots an Arab man to death and is sentenced to death by guillotine. For most people, that would be a devastating series of events. But what does it mean to someone who reacts the same to lying on a beach with his lover as he does to seeing the same sands through a prison window?

Gorgeously shot in shimmering, silvery black-and-white by Manu Dacosse, The Stranger undoubtedly captures the era of the tail-end of the French occupation of Algeria. There’s a timeless quality, as if Ozon is trying to create a film that could have been released days after the book was published: or, rather, as part of the French Nouvelle Vague, with its slightly arched eyebrow and emphasis on naturalism. But somehow that timelessness weighs against it, the black-and-white seeming like a rather forced convention to imply rather than invoke history. Moreover, Ozon seems reluctant to really tackle the book’s inherent subtexts on France’s racist imperial and colonial past.

If anything, the director of 8 Women, In the House, and The New Girlfriend seems most comfortable with the strand of Camus’ book dealing with his favored topic: sexuality. Much of Ozon’s earlier work has been about passion, and here he’s confronted with a purposefully dispassionate central figure. Meursalt’s sense of disconnection is starkly highlighted when he bumps into former workmate Marie (Rebecca Marder) the day after his mother’s funeral. Her raw yearning and almost childlike giddiness, hips thrust towards him in coquettish expectation, could not be more at odds with Meursault’s chiseled marble form and implacable demeanor.

Marie becomes a much weightier and more present figure in Ozon’s script. However, just as in Camus’ novel, she remains a mirror upon which Meursault may reflect upon his own dispassionate nature, much as he does with his neighbors: Raymond (a perfectly sleazy Pierre Lottin), the embodiment of cruelty and violence, and aging drunk Salamano (Denis Lavant, Holy Motors, Beau Travail), who beats his dog but is heartbroken when he runs away. They have passion for something, while Marder exquisitely fills Meursault with that nothingness. Or rather, it’s a certain equanimity, as fascinated and satisfied with a prison floor as a comfy bed. As he tells his lawyer as he waits for trial, “I don’t question myself much anymore.”

Quite possibly the real issue is that Camus tells Meursault’s story from Meursault’s perspective. Much of the book’s coal-black absurdist humor comes from having the reader spend so much time inside the thoughts of a character disinterested in introspection. Maybe Ozon should have looked to another midcentury European intellectual dissident for inspiration: Perhaps the only path to bring Meursault’s muted inner life is Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect, where the subtext is brought right to the surface.

Ozon comes close at a few moments. Take, for example, the transition in the book between parts 1 and 2, when Meursault stands over the bullet-riddled body of the unnamed Arab. Here, Meursault recites a brief passage from the book as an inner monologue, explaining how this is the moment that changes his life forever. Of course, Camus’ joke is that the event doesn’t change his implacable inner life at all, but that’s much harder to reflect that onscreen in such a conventional film. If Ozon just had his leading man constantly read the text, it would be heavy-handed and obvious, but in the moments when he does it adds a certain intellectual gravitas and wry comedy.

And therein lies the internal contradiction of adapting L’Étranger: It may well be that Ozon has made the best possible conventional adaptation of the book. Yet maybe it requires a more unconventional touch to truly translate Camus’ point.

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This article appears in April 17 • 2026.