The Stranger

François Ozon (Swimming Pool, 8 Women) adapts Albert Camus’s existentialist classic in glorious, shimmering monochrome. Meursault (Summer of ’85’s Benjamin Voisin) is living in Algeria at an icy remove from the concerns of his own life. When he kills the brother of his girlfriend, an Algerian man, he is unable to relate to himself or the police why he has spilled blood. 

Camus’s novel is a portrait of alienation that is perhaps the widest read French book ever published. The colonial indifference expressed by the central character could not be more relevant today, and Ozon approaches the material with a stately visual approach, but also an aliveness that sounds the alarm on its contemporary relevance.