‘The Stranger’ San Sebastian Review: Bringing Meursault to Life on Screen

Adapting Albert Camus’s classic novel The Stranger is an evident challenge, and that becomes clear when you read it. Its protagonist, Meursault, is a man who seems indifferent to everything, acting mechanically, barely speaking, and showing little interest in anything. An enigmatic figure—and that’s exactly what makes him so fascinating—Meursault becomes a complicated character to bring to life on screen. He works perfectly in literature, of that there’s no doubt. On film, he’s a tough nut to crack. That’s the metaphorical nut François Ozon tackles with elegance in this meticulous, faithful, and quietly unsettling adaptation, one that succeeds in giving faces, bodies, and movement to the philosophical ideas expressed in Camus’s celebrated 1942 novel.

Aside from some cosmetic changes (the film begins with him entering prison, an event that happens much later in the book), Meursault remains an enigma—a man who seems empty inside, without an interior monologue, someone who acts almost reflexively. Played with the most expressionless face imaginable by Benjamin Voisin, Meursault is a Frenchman living in 1930s Algeria, working as a dull office clerk. One day he learns of his mother’s death (this is how the novel opens, with the famous line: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”) and travels to the remote home where she lived for the funeral. But his face and his gait reveal no emotion. He doesn’t cry, barely speaks. He simply goes through the motions. His mind—if it can even be called that—seems elsewhere. Or perhaps not there at all.

The Stranger centers on a series of events following his mother’s death, culminating—in the first part of the novel—in the killing of an Arab that the protagonist himself commits for reasons even he doesn’t fully understand. Between those two points, Meursault has a romance with the beautiful and intense Marie (Rebecca Marder), forms a friendship with the dark and violent Sintès (Pierre Lottin), and drifts through life with his usual apathy and calm, to the point that one wonders what people see in him. Perhaps, more than anything, they simply enjoy hearing their own voices. Until, as The Cure’s song that plays here reminds us, he “kills an Arab.” And just like that, he becomes the protagonist of his own story.

Camus’s novel has always been seen as a meditation on life’s meaninglessness, the absence of empathy, detachment, and the futility of seeking a rational justification for existence. It’s not that the protagonist doesn’t care; it’s that—at least for much of the story—he doesn’t even consider such questions. Does he want to marry? Yes, no, it doesn’t matter. Is he afraid of death? Well, everyone faces it eventually. Nothing strikes him. Or rather, everything has already passed through him to the point where it all seems the same. Mother can die, your friends can be violent, your girlfriend can propose marriage, or you can kill someone because it’s hot and the sun is in your eyes. Things just happen, and it doesn’t change much what you think about it.

Filmed in elegant black-and-white with remarkable fidelity to the original text —stylistically and tonally, it occasionally recalls the series Ripley, based on the similarly enigmatic protagonist of several novels by Patricia Highsmith—, Ozon breathes life into a story whose protagonist seems to have no interior life—the greatest challenge for any narrative work, especially in a visual medium where ideas have to inhabit real bodies and faces. While some passages occasionally veer into visual prettiness, turning this harsh story into something like a stylish object for the bedside table, Ozon maintains the maddening enigma that runs through the novel, one that remains unresolved nearly a century later.

Ozon doesn’t reference the present day, yet it’s not hard to see Meursault reflected in the dissociated coldness with which some modern criminals behave—those who enter public spaces and commit acts of violence as if they were machines incapable of empathy. Meursault, of course, “kills an Arab,” which adds another layer of complexity and controversy (ask Robert Smith) through a colonial lens, something already present in the original text. Indeed, in the second part of the novel and the film—centered on the trial and his personal breakdown afterward—the prosecutors and jury are more shocked by his indifference at his mother’s funeral than by the fact that he killed an “indigenous man.”

These elements shock because one can sense today that we are surrounded by potential Meursaults: in the streets, on social media, in that liminal space between the real and the virtual. And Ozon’s adaptation captures that unnerving spirit—not through modern sets or locations (it remains 1930s Algeria rather than 2025 France) but through the pervasive, disquieting essence of the character. Figures like Meursault remain relevant and unsettling because this way of seeing the world persists, appearing every day. The film includes this particularly in its final part, in his furious release when the prison chaplain visits—where we first sense something vibrating within the shell that always seemed empty. “Let there be many spectators on the day of my execution, and let them greet me with cries of hate,” he says here. And the line is just as harrowing today as it was then.