L'Étranger

One of the seminal literary texts of the 20th Century, Albert Camus’s 1942 novella The Stranger frames the arbitrary killing of an Arab by a French colonial in Algiers as an act of existential alienation. François Ozon’s superbly realised and meticulously controlled adaptation honours Camus’s crisp, cruel prose while offering sharp inflections of his own regarding sexuality and colonialism. Benjamin Voisin is Mersault, a callow but determinedly honest young man in French Algiers. Apprised of the death of his mother in a provincial care home, Mersault betrays no emotion at her funeral, and indeed immediately picks up a young woman (Rebecca Marder) when he returns home — a detail that will prove a crucial factor in his trial.

Recreating 1940s Algeria in vivid, high contrast black and white cinematography, L’Etranger is erotic, enigmatic and brutal in equal measures, a masterful screen version of an insoluble classic.

Confounding, disturbing and yet icily compelling.

Jessica Kiang, Variety

As sleek and charged as a cat on a telephone wire […] The period recreation of ’30s Algiers is shot though with elegance, and there is a fetishistic attention to the beauty of faces, places and things. The level of craft present in creating the mood is transfixing and the film works as a fever dream set in the tail-end of French colonial rule.

Sophie Monks Kaufman, IndieWire

An insightful re-reading of Camus, vividly evocative of the world it depicts, and irreducibly an Ozon film.

Jonathan Romney, Sight & Sound