The Stranger
Drama • 2025 • 2 hours
L'étranger
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
Meursault lives without passions or lies, estranged from himself and from the world. A chance killing leads him to trial, where not only the crime but his radical indifference is judged. Ozon translates Camus into a relentless portrait of the absurd and of human solitude.
“The meaning of life is the most urgent of questions, and yet the most useless one.”
(A. Camus)
More than an adaptation, this film is a slow immersion into the human enigma that The Stranger harbors. Meursault, the literary creation Albert Camus had entrusted to the twentieth century as the incarnation of the absurd, returns to the screen as an opaque body, traversed by a neutrality more unsettling than guilt itself.
The film restores his condition as a man who does not choose—or rather, who lives under the sign of the impossibility of choice. Not because he is cowardly or perversely indifferent, but because the void inhabiting him erases every horizon of meaning. Meursault is not a protagonist, not a hero, nor even an antihero: he is a spectator of his own life, a wandering anonymity, a being who repeats the formula “I don’t know” as the only possible way to utter the impossible. In him, the lack of emotion is neither narcissistic calculation nor sadistic coldness: it is metaphysical melancholy, the reflection of a life revealed as senseless and irredeemably devoid of direction. And at the same time, Meursault embodies both emptiness and the impossibility of telling or telling himself lies: his transparency is so radical that it condemns him to an existential confusion no one can share, and to an incomprehension as general as it is universal.
Ozon underscores the paradoxical dimension of this figure: condemned not only by a human tribunal but already by himself, incapable of adhering to what the world considers life. His apathy is not escape but destiny: the inner silence that extends over every gesture, from love reduced to accident to the murder that happens like a blunt mishap, without justification or premeditation.
And here arises the question the film poses, more piercing than the crime itself: what responsibility can be attributed to a man who finds no meaning in existence? Is he guilty, or is he simply the ultimate witness to a universal condition we all would rather elude? Meursault, devoid of interest both in others and in himself, may be less free than anyone else—and precisely for this reason becomes the figure of a more radical truth: that there is no choice, except the acceptance of the void.
It is crucial to note how Ozon has chosen to adhere rigorously and respectfully to Camus’ text. He has not allowed himself arbitrary deviations nor improper contaminations: an act of fidelity that seems not only necessary but even dutiful. It would have been unforgivable, in fact, to bend to spectacular or updating needs a novel that, in its original writing, already possesses an absolute contemporaneity. Camus knew how to recount the absurdity of life with a lucidity that has lost none of its disruptive power; for this reason, the work required no adaptation or disguise, but rather radical respect. Ozon understood this necessity and made it his compass: to represent without distorting, to give image without betraying the word, to render complexity without simplifying. In this fidelity lies the greatness of the project: not passive imitation, but conscious adherence to the extraordinariness of Camus’ tale—an act of interpretation that becomes at once homage and guardianship.
Ozon’s sharp and sophisticated gaze thus transforms Camus’ novel into a contemporary prism. It offers no consolations, no catharsis: it leaves us facing a man who does not believe, does not love, does not hope. A man who asks nothing of the world except to be allowed to exist in his silence. And who, in the end, forces us to ask whether we are truly free, or merely phantoms performing the role of freedom while nothingness precedes and awaits us. The answer is evident.
“The world itself is not reasonable; that is all that can be said.”
(A. Camus)
This movie was in the official competition of 82nd Venice International Film Festival 2025
