The Stranger (in-person & online)

Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin, Swann Arlaud

Adapting Albert Camus’ classic existentialist novel, prolific writer-director François Ozon (8 Women, Swimming Pool, Under the Sand) delivers an enigmatic portrait of disaffection amid the tensions of 1930s French-colonised Algeria.

Algiers, 1938. An unassuming man in his early thirties, Meursault (Benjamin Voisin, who also starred in Ozon’s Summer of 85) attends his mother’s funeral, at which he does not cry. The next day, he begins a casual affair with his colleague Marie (Rebecca Marder) and slips back into his daily routine. But life is soon disrupted by his neighbour Sintès (Pierre Lottin), who draws Meursault into an altercation over an ex-lover. Then, one blisteringly hot afternoon, an inexplicable, tragic event occurs on a beach; one that will see Meursault’s very moral standing brought into question…

Voisin is terrific as the unnervingly unbothered Meursault in Ozon’s dreamy, detached film. Shot in sculptural black-and-white, The Stranger shines a contemporary lens on Camus’ tale of alienation and mystery, capturing a charged society on the boil.