L'Étranger (2025)
Genre: Crime / Drama
Duration: 120 minuten
Alternative title: The Stranger
Country:
France
Directed by: François Ozon
Stars: Benjamin Voisin, Pierre Lottin and Swann Arlaud
IMDb score:
7,1 (2.125)
Releasedate: 29 October 2025
This movie is not available on US streaming services.
L'Étranger plot
In 1930s Algeria, the young, indifferent Meursault is making his way through life. One fateful day on the beach, he commits murder, which leads to a trial. Both the crime and his personality are examined in the process.
Reviews & comments
Lavrot
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- 941 messages
- 0 votes
A beautiful black-and-white film and a truly captivating story. I've read The Stranger, and I see some major differences between the book and the film. In my opinion, Ozon has injected too much of his own perspective, which should really be forbidden when adapting a "philosophical novel." In a review in The Guardian, I read that he was even accused of "wokeism" (a terrible word).
In my view, the book, the story, is a purely philosophical staging to highlight the absurdity of death. That people feel the need to add all sorts of psychological and cultural context to it is not only unfair but completely illogical.
The so-called "answer" to the book, published some 70 years later, also showed very little understanding of the novel and Camus's philosophy. Ozon listened too much to this "answer." The Arab's death could just as easily have been an anonymous carpenter with whom his neighbor had a quarrel.
All in all, a fantastic film that, just like the book, continues to resonate for a long time!
Translated from Dutch · View original
mrklm
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- 11629 messages
- 10041 votes
An indifferent Frenchman [Benjamin Voisin] walks into an Algerian cell and tells his cellmates: "I killed an Arab." In a long flashback, we discover the dull, pointless things he did before shooting the Arab. Then follows a trial that also leaves us no wiser. Lottin brings some life to the proceedings as the dubious Sintès, but the sparse voice-overs (taken from Albert Camus's 1942 book) highlight the film's shortcoming: Ozon and Haffad lose themselves in a reconstruction of French Algeria in the 1930s and fail to provide insight into the protagonist's inner world. This also explains Voisin's lackluster performance. Beautiful packaging, no substance.
Translated from Dutch · View original
starbright boy (moderator films)
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- 22473 messages
- 5142 votes
Great film. I did read the book. In high school, in French. I couldn't do that now. But I've already read bits in Dutch after watching this film and L'Arabe (Film, 2026), which screened at the IFFR. That IFFR film was a somewhat traditional but well-made adaptation of the aforementioned epilogue novel, which centers on the Arab's brother. Ozon uses the name the Arab is given in that book, and that's the main thing Ozon adds. That's certainly not a dissonance for me. It approaches an element already present in the book differently, and that's also the difference between the perspective of 1942 and that of 2016. The film stays close to the book and captures the essence well. And that's quite something when you adapt such a classic book for film. While the recent film adaptation of Wurthering Heights was already about the 35th, if you count TV adaptations, L'Etranger is only the second direct-to-screen adaptation, and there are also two films that link the story to the story. So, considerably less.
Ozon more or less said in an interview that he uses black and white film because it's easier to make the setting look like it did in the early 1940s, but the film reveals much more than that. It looks much better and has far more style than Ozon ever had. The facial shots are beautiful. The use of lighting is phenomenal. Voisin delivers a truly brilliant performance. Elusive, like the protagonist in the book, and meticulously human yet apathetic.
A fantastic film that should have won awards in Venice and clearly the best that Ozon (for me a very inconsistent director, the previous one I saw in the cinema, Mon Crime, was terrible) has made and probably will make.
Translated from Dutch · View original
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