Benjamin Voisin as Meursault (Photo: WikipediaCommons)
French director François Ozon’s new film brings Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger into the 21st century.
Benjamin Voisin plays main character Meursault as the perfect heartless void. He learns his mother has died and barely shrugs. Not quite stoical, just switched off. Who knew indifference could be portrayed with such depth?
Still set in Algeria during the French Empire, the film sharpens the novel’s colonial rot through a contemporary lens.
In Camus’ 1942 original the murdered man is simply “the Arab” and his sister a complete non-entity.
Here they become Moussa and Djemila, abused and exploited Algerians granted names and glimpses of humanity.
A pointed dialogue between characters Djemila and Marie on racial injustice lands like a slap.
Meursault drifts on, blithely unaware while chatting to a sex worker, shrugging at marriage, watching his neighbour beat his dog and his mate batter his girlfriend.
Meursault has the privilege not to care—until the beach. Here he shoots Moussa “because of the sun,” knowing a white could get away with it.
Racist entitlement is dressed up as existential whimsy. Ozon’s film is stunning visually and radiates heat.
It exposes the book’s casual bigotry even as it softens it. Meursault’s execution by a racist system is absurd as colonial justice rarely hanged its own and his final martyr pose is unintentionally comic. The alienated white man is recast as a tragic hero.
This is where the modern parallel bites hardest. Meursault’s chilling detachment mirrors today’s manosphere. Indifferent to violence, entitled, floating above consequences until the system they serve turns on them.
Ozon nails how capitalism breeds this emotional desert of atomised settlers and brutalised natives while also using them as props.
Sharp and quietly furious, the film captures alienation brilliantly but pulls its punch on collective fury.
It is a devastating colonial critique that leaves you just a little fired up.
