Such a person would probably be called psychopathic today. Or narcissistic, or Machiavellian, or perhaps all three. Humanity and empathy seem to be lacking in him: In the second half of Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger, the first-person narrator Meursault, who is imprisoned in Algiers for the murder of an Algerian, insults a priest. “What do I care about the death of others, what about a mother’s love. What do I care about God, what the life one chooses,” he says, and he calls himself “happy” after the startled God-fearing man has left him.
To feel “less alone,” he desires only one thing: “On the day of my execution many spectators who greet me with shouts of hate.”
It is the merciless tone of Camus’ tightly written story that made the book a dark existentialist bestseller in 1942. The rejection of life repeatedly voiced by Meursault remains, in François Ozon’s new film adaptation—the second after Luchino Visconti’s 1967 version—just as scandalous and fascinating as in the original text. For although Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) insists on his emotional numbness and the futility of his existence, his bodily senses stay vividly active.
They surge in the wonderfully plastic, cool images of Belgian cinematographer Manuel Dacosse, cavort on the orchestral score by Kuwaiti composer Fatima Al Quadiri, and vibrate in the enigmatically empty gazes of the attractively chain-smoking lead actor. Ozon’s drama is a game of references and insinuations.
“The Stranger”. Director: François Ozon. With Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, and others. France 2025, 122 min.
The 58-year-old director pays homage to and quotes Visconti’s method, born in 1906 (seven years before Camus), who subtly threaded the homoeroticism of the material into the veiled glances of the young Arabs, into their casually cast bodies, and, in a man in swim trunks standing on a terrace, seemed to channel a classic photograph of his former partner, the pioneering fashion photographer Horst P. Horst.
Nihilistic View of the World
Moreover, the fact that Ozon stages his film (unlike Visconti) in black and white itself reads as a reference. On the one hand, the retrograde image anchors the story in the late 1930s and stylistically suits the newsreel cuts at the film’s outset, which make clear France’s occupation of Algeria by the colonial power. On the other hand, it underscores the coldness and distance, that nihilistic “colorlessness” with which Meursault gazes at the world.
For the distant diagnosis of someone with the traits of the “Dark Triad” (psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism) is modern, but need not be decisive: At the Venice Film Festival in summer 2025, where Ozon first presented his film, he spoke of his interest precisely in the uncertainty of Meursault’s character—the unclassified—and that his film aims to offer no lasting analysis.
From the inscrutable French Meursault, who in sun-baked Algiers learns of his estranged mother’s death, Ozon recounts the story according to his own script. With borrowed mourning éclat, Meursault takes a bus to the retirement home where his mother had lived for years. At the vigil he nods off and afterwards shares a cigarette and coffee with a staff member; at the funeral only a few elderly people accompany the coffin, and Meursault learns by chance that his mother had a new “friend”: unlike her son, she seemed to have chosen a life with relationships.
A Placid Daytime Idler
Back in Algiers, Meursault begins the next day a superficial relationship with his former colleague Marie (Rebecca Marder). They go swimming, to the cinema, sunbathe, and in Meursault’s small apartment, filled with street noise, they have lazy sex in the afternoon. When Marie asks him if he loves her, Meursault answers evasively.
Voisin delivers in his role such a convincing blend of allure, mystery, and contempt that Marie, crafted by Marder (and Ozon) far more multidimensional and expressive than Visconti’s ever-smiling “subject of desire,” loses her warmth for the placid daytime idler.
When Marie is away, Meursault spends the sultry days smoking even more and sitting by the window. He hears and sees how a crusty old neighbor (Denis Lavant) lives in a hate-love relationship with an old crusty dog, and he helps another neighbor, the aggressive pimp Raymond (Pierre Lottin), to draft a letter to a woman of Arab descent who is later abused by Raymond.
Her brother and another man follow Raymond, Meursault, and Marie on a trip to a beach, where later, under the blazing sun, comes the scene that splits the novel into two parts—and marks the high point and the culmination of the narrator’s quest for meaning: Meursault shoots the young Arab because, as he later claims, the sun blinded him.
No Hope for Forgiveness
In prison, where he is initially held in a communal cell, he continues to display indifference toward himself, acquaintances, lawyers, and judges. After interrogations, the trial, and a long conversation with a priest (Swann Arlaud) about ethics and faith, Meursault’s path inexorably leads to the place that a morally self-perceived, outraged society reserves for murderers: the gallows. The focus of that final exchange, both in Visconti and in Ozon, lies in Meursault’s assertion of not believing in God—and thereby depriving himself of any hope of forgiveness.
The nuanced tensions of the novel, which speak to the racism and classism of the colonial power and thereby to an audience that ultimately considers the murder of a Person of Color less condemnable than Meursault’s obstinate behavior afterward, are more explicit in Ozon than in Visconti. The unnamed “Arab” is deliberately given a name by him—Moussa Hamdani; overall, Algerians seem to continually observe the “stranger,” the French, and his conduct.
At the same time, Ozon gives his film a captivating haptics. It is all the scent and sounds of Algiers, all idleness and smoking, all shimmering heat, fluttering curtains, crumpled sheets, and (black-and-white) sun. What Visconti was meant to show with the lead actor Marcello Mastroianni’s ever-closer shirt clinging to his body and his doubtful squint is here achieved by Ozon and Voisin with a cool, distant gaze from the protagonist.
If you swooned with Visconti, you will shudder with Ozon. Making the coldness tangible despite the sun is one of the film’s great strengths. The fact that Ozon could license The Cure’s existentialist anthem “Killing an Arab” for the end credits appropriately brings the mood to a close.
The Stranger, less a self-chosen and thus feeling nihilist, and more a person estranged by society, its sentiments, and moral codes, whether or not he bears a clinical diagnosis, comes frighteningly close to us. After all, men who act without care, who perceive women only as bodies, and who are not ashamed of their crimes are currently riding high on the wave of success.
