The Stranger

Dir: François Ozon | France | 2025 | 122 mins | Subtitled

Cast | Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin, Swann Arlaud

François Ozon (8 Women, Swimming Pool, Under the Sand) returns with a career-best work, an exquisite adaptation of Albert Camus’ classic existentialist novel. an enigmatic portrait of disaffection amid the tensions of pre-war French-colonised Algeria.

Algiers, 1938. Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) attends his mother’s funeral, at which he does not cry. The next day, he begins a casual affair with his colleague Marie (Rebecca Marder) and slips back into his daily routine. But life is soon disrupted by his neighbour Sintès (Pierre Lottin), who draws Meursault into an altercation over an ex-lover. Then, one blisteringly hot afternoon, an inexplicable, tragic event occurs on a beach; one that will see Meursault’s very moral standing brought into question…

Shot in sculptural black-and-white, sensuous, dreamy and detached, The Stranger shines a contemporary lens on Camus’ philosophical provocation, capturing a charged society on the boil.