The Stranger: A thought provoking interpretation on existentialism and oppression

‘The Stranger’ is an adaption of the well-known Camus novel ‘L’Étranger’ (1942) and the second attempt at portraying the story on the big screen, following a version in 1967 staring Marcello Mastroianni. It focuses on Meursault, a young Frenchman living in French Algieria who kills a local Arab man in the wake of his mother’s funeral. After his confession to a French court for the murder, he is condemned, less for the act of violence itself but for his failure to show the appropriate emotional response as deemed by the French court. 

Meursault is defiantly inert throughout most of the film; showing as little sorrow at his mother’s funeral as he does remorse at the hearing for his own death-sentence in a commitment to his existentialism. Raging against a pompous priest who insists on seeing him in his cell, Meursault defends his right to define his emotions on his own terms, furious at the cowardice of a society which won’t articulate the values it so stringently imposes.

The Stranger (Movie poster), from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Stranger_2025_film_poster.jpg#filelinks

Whilst there isn’t much new to say about a popular novella written over 80 years ago, watching this in 2026 it was hard not to see Meursault’s intense stoicism as a form of neurodivergance (not, of course, a new observation). That perhaps his existence in a hot, dusty, bustling world was somewhat at odds with his natural emotional temperament, and his eventual execution was a failure of society to understand neurodevelopmental conditions. The fact that this observation comes to mind is in itself a reflection of how we’ve come to medicalise emotions today in a way that was largely inconceivable nearly a century ago.

Aside from the plot, the film itself suffers, inevitably, from the consequences of telling the story of a character with little to no emotional range. With Meursault’s entire MO basically being to internalise his emotional experience, sitting with him over two hours is not a particularly rewarding experience, especially not in an arid environment with few supporting character’s given sufficient colour to compensate. 

Reviews of ‘The Stranger’ are also understandably fixated with the interpretation of the plot, and the film as the latest comment on Camus’s novella, instead of the film on its own terms. Given this, and two slightly forgettable attempts to commit the story to screen, it leaves you wondering if the book might be best experienced as a book, and left at that.

6/10