“Listen Mr. Mersault, You’re not the first nor last to kill an Arab. You won’t be faulted for that. Trust me, I know the French justice system.” This attempt as reassurance arrives in the middle of François Ozon’s adaptation of Albert Camus’ The Stranger. It is one of a very few lines and moments invented for Ozon’s two-hour film, adapted from Camus’ slim 1942 novella, and it stands out as a sledgehammer blast for that reason. The Stranger has beguiled readers, academics, and philosophers for over 80 years because the simply-told and meticulously constructed story is layered with implication, but kept entirely ambiguous, open to diametrically opposed interpretations of what both the story means and Camus himself believed or was attempting to convey with any given monosyllabic response from its detached narrator/killer. With a few minor tweaks, Ozon has sapped The Stranger of this ambiguity, and in doing so, robbed much of what has made the text worthy of the rich debate that has stretched over nearly a century.
For the many readers of this film nerd outlet who have not yet embarked on the tenth grade’s required reading, The Stranger follows Meursault, a young white French clerk in colonial Algiers who has a muted response to the sudden death of his elderly mother, almost immediately begins a relationship with a young woman that becomes an engagement, becomes enmeshed in the tawdry drama of a shady neighbor, murders an unnamed Arab connected to that drama, spends a year in jail, stands trial, and is convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to be beheaded by guillotine. Meursault floats through the novel as a dispassionate, passive narrator, with much of the action, good and bad, occurring to him unwittingly, including, arguably, the murder.
It is widely regarded as one of the 20th century’s best books because within that plot — stretched to 120 pages in this writer’s Vintage International copy, including very generous margins — the novel is a Magic Eye whose meaning changes depending on what perspective you bring to its action and what decade you’re picking it up in. It’s absurdist, or is it racist, or is it both, or is it neither? And what of its author? One read of the story is that the young clerk is a colonizer who relishes the simple lifestyle of this coastal north African city far from Paris, oriented around the beach, the salt carrying on the air, the quaint bistros, the browned bodies in the sun, but also never quite comfortable in that climate and the, at times, unbearable midday heat and the glaring intensity of that sun that Meursault will claim drove him to murder.
The Arab Meursault kills, the brother of his neighbor’s mistress, is an abstraction in the book. Is this because the murder itself — like the Arabs in the town he occupies — is an abstraction to Meursault? Is the book meant to be a purely rhetorical, philosophical allegory using murder and condemnation as a symbolic device to make a point about alienation in a society dictated by an inauthentic morality itself dictated by Christianity? What is Meursault’s true sin? Failing to performatively grieve his mother? Is it being honest about his vague motives for killing the Arab rather than playing the game and embracing a narrative that would’ve allowed a racist system to acquit him of his crime? What does it say that Meursault would rather kill than lie?
This is a review of a film, not an essay about a novel, but the point is you will walk out of Ozon’s film relieved of most of these quandaries and lines of questioning. Aside from a few conveniences of adaptation, taking a few internal monologues and placing them in the mouths of characters, Ozon’s main addition is injecting the indigenous Algerian perspective into the narrative. The film opens with a period-specific advertisement that might’ve been made by the French tourism bureau encouraging nationals to come visit their property by birthright, undercut by revolutionary graffiti. Meursault’s neighbor’s mistress (Hajar Bouzaouit) and her grief is brought to the fore. Evening prayer carries on the air as the action of the film happens around willfully ignorant Meursault. As he is carted off to jail, we see women in hijabs and boys playing football in the street that he is at last able to truly see.
Because this is Ozon, Meursault is played by Benjamin Voisin, the hot and ripped vision of blonde French masculinity, and the murder is depicted as having overt, tortured, homoerotic undertones between oppressor and oppressed. The Stranger ends with the same famous line from the novella, but with an added beat, as the mistress, here named Dijemila, mourns over the grave of her murdered brother overlooking Meursault’s beloved ocean, lingering on that headstone that, like Kamel Daoud’s hit 2014 reinterpretation The Meursault Investigation, gives the Arab a proper name, while removing all subtlety from the story. Ozon’s film becomes a morality play, of the white man who unjustly, callously killed an Algerian and received a punishment commensurate with his crime. Some might argue this is what the story always has been, and those people probably didn’t care for The Stranger.
Ozon nails all the details, down to the nurse with a bandage where her nose should be, the fondling of a breast, an escape artist distracting an old neighbor (Denis Lavant!) while a mangy dog runs away. When the film was first shown in the fall of last year at Venice, it garnered comparisons to Bresson, but in its gorgeous black-and-white photography and its literalist, near verbatim treatment of its high school English source material, the film rather evokes Ripley, Steve Zaillan’s stately, eight-episode series that was arguably detrimentally faithful to Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel. Both of these productions are sumptuous, and studied, but in their slavish attention to detail, they lose the essence and magic of their texts.
This has less to do with Ozon than Camus and his novella, which has never had a successful adaptation in spite of several tries. It resists filmic language because of its construction, with a first half that is written in an “American” fashion, as Camus framed it at the time, with short, blunt, visceral, and descriptive Hemingwayesque sentences, before Meursault goes to jail in the second half and the narrative becomes interior and crushing in its doomed elaborate lyricism. This comes after the murder, where the point and true inquisition of the novel lives. It is also, uncoincidentally, the exact moment the film loses sight of its purpose, and falls apart.
Published as part of Rendez-vous with French Cinema 2026.
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