The Arab: this symbolic tale of post-revolution Algeria is a powerful update to Camus

• Reviewed from the 2026 International Film Festival Rotterdam

The past year has seen a sudden resurgence of interest in Albert Camus’s 1942 novel, The Stranger, the Ur-text of existentialism and classical French ennui, with François Ozon’s vivid cinematisation of its barebones plot, its ambiguities rife with metaphorical potentialities, about a Frenchman living in colonial Algiers who murders an Arab native on the beach one afternoon for no apparent reason, illuminating the international festival circuit. It screened at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, alongside a much better film that re-imagines Camus’s novel from the perspective of the nameless victim. 

Malek Bensmaïl’s The Arab is itself an adaptation of a novel by Algerian writer Kamel Daoud, 2013’s The Meursault Investigation, a rambling first-person account told by the victim’s brother to a nameless stranger in a bar. To Daoud’s narrative, Bensmaïl adds a key character, who takes the part of that nameless stranger: Kamel (Nabil Asli), a journalist notorious for his opinionated, anti-establishment commentary in one of the country’s leading newspapers – a dangerous position of defiance, as the film’s present backdrop is the Civil War that engulfed Algeria for the entirety of the 1990s. 

Kamel spends his nights drowning his duress in the illicit watering holes of Oran. It is in one of them that he is approached by an older man named Haroun, played by the iconic Algerian actor Ahmed Benaissa in what would be his final role (he passed away in 2022 at the age of seventy-eight), with an extraordinary and unlikely story: that Camus’s novel is not a fiction. That the slain character referred to in the novel only as “the Arab” was, in fact, his older brother. 

The second act is Haroun’s story: which, like Daoud’s novel, shadows Camus’s story of Meursault in perplexing and intriguing ways. One need not have read Daoud’s novel – or, for that matter, Camus’s – to pick up the main theme, which is rooted in Algeria’s own colonial narrative. Camus’s novel is essentially about Meursault’s relationship with his deceased mother (its opener, “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte”, is among the most famous in all modern literature); Daoud’s is about Haroun’s relationship with his own mother, very much alive and crazed by the tragic loss of her older son and haunted by a sense of injustice. 

Hiam Abbass – a Palestinian actress best known for her role as Marcia Roy, one of the more nuanced and quasi-sympathetic characters on the streaming series Succession (2018-2023) – makes the mother’s devastation visceral and felt, sympathetic and revolting all at once. To call her overbearing would perhaps veer too far into Freudian cliché yet is not at all inaccurate. At the film’s apex, on the eve of the revolution when the French are being thrown out and independence is being established, she literally forces her son’s hand in a way that will have resonant consequences for them both.  

In telling Haroun’s story via flashback, Bensamil trains his lens on the country’s coastal landscape, taking us through the hilly cityscapes of its coastal capital to the fertile grasslands of the countryside, where post-revolution Haroun and his mother end up living a sort of gilded internal exile in the luxurious home left behind by a French family. But the film’s ultimate grounding in the grim militarised reality of the 1990s, with the paranoia and risk of death everywhere, exposes the stains that colonialism inevitably leaves on a place; it is a legacy, we intuit in turn, that the country has still yet to completely overcome. 

Which is not to suggest that Bensamil or his characters merely embrace a position of victimhood. Kamel, the journalist, is the film’s critical consciousness, his rebellious nature that of the secular, liberal-minded intellectual; a position not unlike that of Haroun, who arrives at his via the harshness of life experience. In one moving exchange, the two men are walking through the street, when Kamel pauses to ask: “Why is this country so violent?” “It’s not the country,” replies his older interlocutor. “It’s the people: you, me…”  

That Haroun’s brother was killed by a fictional character is clearly an illusion. But is it his illusion or his mother’s? It is never made clear. In fact, his brother disappeared – his body was never found, hence his mother’s despair. The mother, of course, emerges as a symbol for Algeria itself, the wounds and yearnings that punctuate the fabric of its history throughout the past century. If her slain son is destined to be nothing more but a symbol, as in Camus’s narrative, then The Arab endeavours to show just how much complexity resides in that state of namelessness.