THE STRANGER
An overly polite rendition of a venerable classic
Directed by: François Ozon
Starring: Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin, Denis Lavant
Certificate: 15
Released: 10 April 2026
Rating: 7/10
François Ozon could be France's answer to Richard Linklater – a director of indefatigable industry, ready to turn his hand to almost any genre in his quest to keep moving. Following his adventures in screwball comedy (The Crime Is Mine, 2023) and cosy crime (When Autumn Falls, 2024), he returns with a handsome adaptation of Albert Camus' L'Étranger. Remarkably, considering the novel is such a set text of earnest adolescence, it's only the second adaptation since Visconti's seldom-seen 1967 version starring a very sweaty Marcello Mastroianni.
Ozon's decision to film in black and white was apparently a budgetary one, but it proves to be a winning strategy. Though filmed in modern Tunisia, cinematographer Manu Dacosse conjures a high-contrast 1930s Algeria shimmering with Bressonian radiance. It's not an idle comparison: Ozon cast Benjamin Voisin, best known from his own Summer of '85, as Meursault and had him read Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer – full of epigrams of actorly austerity – to prepare. Voisin carries the film through a quality of radical absence: his Meursault doesn't explain himself, doesn't seek sympathy, barely seems to register that anyone else is watching. It is a bold gamble, and one that doesn't entirely come off. Camus' novel works because of Meursault's narration, his voice performing the very indifference it describes. Here, Voisin's handsome void is upstaged at every turn by the swaggering Pierre Lottin as Raymond the pimp, Swann Arlaud as the priest, and in particular Denis Lavant as his dog-beating neighbour, who has never met a scene he didn't fancy stealing.
Ozon has added 21st-century touches, allowing the women and Algerian characters some depth and gently foreshadowing a post-colonial future – anti-occupation graffiti is glimpsed on the streets of Algiers, and Arab characters who remained ciphers in Camus' text are given names and backstory. But this still feels like an overly polite rendition of a venerable classic that could have done with some of the wit and wildness he brought to his version of Petra von Kant.
