“The Stranger”: Moral Judgment as a Sentence

Algiers, 1938. Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), the stranger, a quiet and reserved man in his early thirties, attends his mother’s funeral without shedding a tear. The following day, he begins a relationship with Marie (Rebecca Marder), a former coworker, and resumes his routine with apparent normality. His life is disrupted by the influence of his neighbor Raymond Sintès (Pierre Lottin), who draws him into a personal conflict with tragic consequences.

François Ozon adapts Albert Camus’ celebrated 1942 novel alongside his regular screenwriter Philippe Piazzo, offering an interpretation that, far from domesticating the text, understands it and translates it with remarkable cinematic lucidity.

Black and White as a Continuous Present

Shot in immaculate black and white by Manuel Dacosse, the film preserves intact the philosophical and moral core of the original work. What might be read as a temptation toward solemnity—or as a safety net when confronting an immortal text—proves instead to be profoundly organic. The use of black and white does not freeze the film in the past; it frees it from historical illustration and grants it an uncanny sense of contemporaneity. Ozon avoids academicism, opting for a fluid, restrained mise-en-scène in which the image accompanies—without underlining—the protagonist’s existential estrangement.

Benjamin Voisin in The Stranger (François Ozon, 2025)

Benjamin Voisin: The Impeccable Outsider

Benjamin Voisin (Summer of 85) delivers a Meursault of admirable precision: opaque, distant, yet never caricatured. His performance fully immerses us in Camus’ spirit, sustaining the character’s radical ambiguity. Around him, Rebecca Marder and Pierre Lottin shape an intimate social circle that functions as a mirror—unable to comprehend someone who does not conform to expected emotional codes, yet still capable of love and acceptance.

Fidelity and a Distinctive Language

Ozon remains faithful to Camus’ text almost in its entirety, except a couple of specific scenes where he introduces slight variations. These are neither betrayals nor forced updates, but interpretive choices that reveal a deep understanding of the work. The director does not attempt to “explain” The Stranger, but to embody it. Even when certain visual decisions inevitably evoke Visconti’s adaptation, Ozon manages to move beyond imitation and construct a language of his own, coherent with both the period depicted and our contemporary gaze.

If there is a slightly discordant element, it emerges in the film’s second half: a shift in rhythm introduced by the prison sequences and, above all, the scenes with the priest—played by Swann Arlaud—which slow the preceding tension. Ozon adds a perfectly integrated dream sequence and, apparently due to production demands, a final scene that feels unnecessary, almost like a gesture of political correctness at odds with the film’s overall rigor.

Meanwhile, Fatima Al Qadiri’s score avoids any temptation toward gloomy effect—far removed from Piero Piccioni’s music for Visconti—and integrates soberly into the film’s tone, reinforcing the sense of estrangement without emotionally guiding the viewer.

Moral Judgment: When a Way of Being Is Condemned

The true heart of this adaptation lies in its reading of moral judgment. As in Camus’ novel, Meursault is not condemned solely for the crime he committed, but for being a defendant with whom it is impossible to empathize. The judicial system shifts its focus from the act to the character, from facts to personality, constructing a sentence based on psychological indicators of “homicidal capacity”: his coldness, his silence, his lack of mourning, his emotional inadequacy. Justice ceases to judge what happened and begins to judge who he is.

What happens when the judicial system punishes not only what we do, but who we are?

From Camus to Justine Triet: An Unsettling Continuity

This mechanism—formulated by Camus in 1942—finds a disturbingly clear contemporary resonance in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall. There, the court turns subjectivity into evidence and identity dissidence into an incriminating argument, emphasizing gender performativity and society’s discomfort with a woman who does not fit the expected role. Sandra Hüller precisely embodies the Sandra of the 21st century; Benjamin Voisin, with equal rigor, the Meursault of 1942. Two eras, two bodies, the same structural bias: when justice stops judging facts and starts judging ways of being.

The Stranger: An Uncomfortable Classic for the Present

In The Stranger, François Ozon once again engages with great texts without neutralizing them, respecting their radicality and discomfort. His film does not seek to reconcile us with Meursault, nor to offer reassuring answers. Like Camus, it confronts us with a question that remains profoundly relevant: what happens when the judicial system punishes not only what we do, but who we are?

Presented in the Official Selection at the 82th Venice Film Festival and later in the Perlak section of the San Sebastián International Film Festival, The Stranger opens in Spain on December 19.