François Ozon’s 2025 Adaptation of Camus’ The Stranger Reimagines Colonial Algeria
François Ozon’s L’Étranger, released in 2025, is a Franco-Belgian black-and-white film adaptation of Albert Camus’s 1942 novel The Stranger. Selected for the official competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2025, the film stars Benjamin Voisin as Meursault, the detached protagonist who kills an unnamed Arab man on a beach in Algiers.
The adaptation is noted for its meticulous period detail, presenting 1930s French Algeria as a society replicating French norms while systematically excluding indigenous Algerians from spaces such as beaches, restaurants, rest homes, and cinemas. Meursault’s interactions with Algerians are limited to passing them on the street or sitting beside them on a bus—until the pivotal act of violence.
Ozon’s version engages critically with the novel’s legacy, particularly in light of postcolonial reinterpretations like Kamel Daoud’s 2013 The Meursault Investigation, which reframes the narrative from the perspective of the victim’s brother. Critics have described the film as a “spellbindingly sleek” and “lustrously beautiful” modern take that honors Camus’s text while introducing a contemporary perspective on empire, and race.
The film’s visual style—characterized by its monochrome palette and precise cinematography—has drawn comparisons to French New Wave and Italian neorealism, with reviewers highlighting its “suspended horror and cruel, glinting beauty.”
By foregrounding the colonial context of Algiers and the erasure of Algerian identity in Camus’s original work, Ozon’s adaptation invites renewed discussion about the intersection of existentialism, morality, and imperialism in mid-20th-century North Africa.