OFFICIAL SELECTION - 2025 VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (In Competition)
OFFICIAL SELECTION - 2025 BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL
OFFICIAL SELECTION - 2025 SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL
The superb new film from multi-award winning writer/director François Ozon (Swimming Pool, 8 Women, Under the Sand), THE STRANGER is a gripping adaptation of Albert Camus’ landmark novella about an emotionally detached young expat under trial for murder in 1930s French-colonised Algeria.
Summer, 1938. Meursault (Benjamin Voison, Lost Illusions), a quiet and unassuming clerk in his early thirties, attends his mother’s funeral. The next day, he begins a casual affair with Marie (Rebecca Marder), a colleague he encounters at the local baths, and quickly slips back into routine. However, daily life is soon disrupted by his volatile neighbour (an excellent Pierre Lottin, My Brother’s Band), who draws Meursault into an altercation involving an ex-lover. And then, one blisteringly hot afternoon, an inexplicable, tragic event occurs on a beach; one that will see Meursault’s very moral standing brought to question…
Visually resplendent with sensuous black-and-white images, Ozon’s elegant and masterfully realised film shines a contemporary lens on Camus' classic tale of dissociation and mystery, capturing the beauty and heat of a charged society on the boil. Both impactful and memorable, THE STRANGER is must-see French cinema of the highest order.
