The Stranger: François Ozon’s insightful re-reading of Camus’ classic novella explores themes of queerness and Algerian identity

• Reviewed from the 69th BFI London Film Festival 2025

François Ozon’s The Stranger is a faithful adaptation of Albert Camus’s 1942 novella, yet with a subtle revisionist slant. Critical debate has long focused on the erasure of Algerian identity in Camus’s story, in which a Frenchman kills a man referred to only as ‘an Arab’. Today, it is impossible to think of Camus’s L’Étranger without acknowledging a recent fiction written as a critical response, The Meursault Investigation (2013) by Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud.

Daoud restores a personal history and a name, Moussa, to the young man shot dead by Camus’s anti-hero Meursault. Similarly restoring the missing dimension of Algerian identity, Ozon’s The Stranger very much comes across as made in the wake of Daoud. That is evident from Ozon’s initial framing of the story through a pastiche black-and-white newsreel presenting Algiers as a “splendid modern city” and a predominantly French one – until we glimpse a wall bearing the graffiti of the Algerian Liberation Front.

Ozon’s version of Camus is richer – visually and thematically – than Luchino Visconti’s inert 1967 film starring Marcello Mastroianni. Benjamin Voisin, from Ozon’s Summer of 85 (2020), is inspired casting, his youthful Meursault coming across as unformed, callow, as if born into the world only after his mother’s death. Voisin’s physical lightness and air of fragility suggest a European on whom North Africa weighs too heavily; “It was because of the sun,” Meursault says of his crime, but the pressure on him of the Algerian climate is evident from the start. He is mocked by young Algerians as he walks through the countryside to his mother’s nursing home – for them, a ridiculous figure in his heavy, formal clothes.

Voisin’s detached elegance very much lends itself to a characteristically Ozonian queering of the story. In his relationship with girlfriend Marie, it is clear that — for her and the viewer — Meursault is the object of erotic contemplation, his body very much the focus of a nude scene. His sexual ambivalence emerges in the fatal confrontation on the beach. Meursault and his thuggish neighbour Sintès have an initial skirmish with Moussa and his friends, but Meursault then returns alone to the spot. The subsequent face-off is filmed like a cruising encounter, a subjective shot conveying Meursault’s gaze at the young man’s armpit, then at his knife, which flicks up phallically, reflected sunlight dazzling the Frenchman. The suggestion is that, in shooting Moussa, Meursault is attempting to kill his own desire – repressing that which, in conformist colonial society, risks marking him out as an absolute outsider.

Meursault is in one sense a refusenik, unwilling or unable to produce the conventional signs and declarations – of love, of mourning – that would qualify him as a proper citizen. Conversely, he is only too ready to conform to expectations, colluding with the racism and misogyny of Sintès, whose smirking brutishness is brilliantly conveyed by Pierre Lottin, so memorably taciturn in Ozon’s recent When Autumn Comes (2024).

Above all, Ozon reintroduces Algerians and their country as a dominant presence. Ozon’s reading of L’Étranger makes it clear that the invisibility of Algeria in Camus’s novel, which Meursault narrates, stands for the wilful blindness that embodies the colonial mindset. After his arrest, Meursault gazes out from a police van and sees, as if for the first time, the Arab world that had always surrounded him.

In its spare, though highly detailed period realism and Manu Dacosse’s glistening black-and-white camerawork, The Stranger is altogether Bressonian. Indeed, Voisin very much recalls the vulnerability and closed-in opacity of Martin LaSalle, the lead in Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), and Meursault’s conversation with Marie through prison bars directly recalls that film’s ending.

But the film rather suffers from the same problem as the novel – it is fascinating as long as its protagonist is an economically sketched enigma. But when Meursault, on the verge of execution, converses with a priest, the story becomes a sombre exercise in philosophical debate, narratively less potent and certainly less fertile in cinematic terms. The solemnity of this part of the film is somewhat offset by the casting of the priest: Swann Arlaud (2023’s Anatomy of a Fall),  who embodies sympathetically thoughtful sensibility rather than forbidding authority.

The Stranger may lack the freewheeling invention of the director’s best original material – but it is an insightful re-reading of Camus, vividly evocative of the world it depicts, and irreducibly an Ozon film. The sophistication only lapses during the end titles, set in a grating shift of tone to the Cure’s Camus-inspired ‘Killing an Arab’.