The Stranger review: A fresh, post-colonial take on the Camus classic

Prolific and unpredictable, François Ozon is one of modern French cinema's most important directors. Releasing a new film almost every year for the past quarter of a century, Ozon has skipped between genres, from sultry erotic thrillers and surrealist satires to jukebox comedies and black-and-white period dramas. With The Stranger, he turns his hand to the existential and the absurd, adapting and subtly updating Albert Camus’ famous novella of the same name.

In the 1940s, in French colonial Algeria, a young, emotionally detached Frenchman called Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) receives news of his mother’s death via telegram. Under a sweltering Algerian sun, he visits the retirement home where she spent her final years and holds a vigil there before her funeral, expressing not a flicker of sadness or emotion at her passing. He visits the local swimming baths the next day, where he meets an old acquaintance, Marie (Rebecca Marder), with whom he begins a relationship. On a trip to the beach with Marie and his thuggish friend, Sintès (Pierre Lottin), however, Meursault senselessly kills an Algerian man, ‘because of the sun’.