Queer French director François Ozon has brought his deft and daring touch to films of many genres, from comedies like 8 Women and the Catherine Deneuve-starring Trophy Wife to youthful romances like Summer of 85, historical dramas like Frantz, and psycho-sexual thrillers like Swimming Pool and Double Lover.

Ozon’s 2025 adaptation of the famed Camus novel The Stranger, now on streaming and coming to DVD and Blu-ray this month from Music Box Films, delves into novel territory for a director for whom a mischievous joie de vivre seems to lurk even in his most dramatic work.

The film delves into the profound and mysterious soul that dwells behind the detached persona of a young Frenchman named Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) living in Algiers in the 1930s. Mersault drifts through his days, performing his work well enough that he’s approached about a promotion (for which he has no enthusiasm) and relating to his friends and neighbors well enough that he becomes a sounding board for a pensioner (Denis Lavant) whose dog has gone astray, as well as a shady, if gregarious, man named Sintès (Pierre Lottin), whose treatment of a young woman named Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit) leads to accusations that he’s a pimp, as well as to the menacing, vengeful attentions of her brother, Moussa (Abderrahmane Dehkani).

Mersualt only lights up for brief, giddy moments when he’s with his girlfriend, Marie (Rebecca Marder) or getting up to boyish hijinks such as leaping onto the back of passing trucks in order to steal a ride. Otherwise, his guarded watchfulness suggests a deep-seated ennui, or perhaps clinical depression — or, perhaps, a philosophical disposition that could charitably be described as stoic but is usually taken as existentialist. Ozon isn’t happy to settle too deeply on any one label.

He and Voisin give Meursalt a muted rainbow of moods and responses, from his dry-eyed duties at his mother’s vigil and funeral to his steadfast refusal to be cowed or shaken when Moussa, together with another young man, follows Sintès and he to a friend’s isolated beachside house. After Moussa attacks Sintès with a knife, Mersault goes for a stroll along the seaside and happens across him. Flashing his knife once more — the sun glinting off the blade and blinding Mersault — Moussa ends up being shot; but Mersault doesn’t stop with a single bullet: He empties the gun into Moussa’s body, thus opening himself up to charges of a having committed a bloodless, premeditated crime.

Ozon establishes the film’s tone and mood through shooting in black and white and using Fatima Al Qadiri’s haunting, minimalist score to relay a sense of distance and inability to connect. That Mersault is condemned as much for his lack of readily legible emotional responses as for the shooting itself remains a central motif, but director and star work to make Mersault’s eventual impassioned outburst of despair a well-earned catharsis rather than a numbed-out anticlimax.

The Stranger is streaming now at major platforms.

The Stranger comes to DVD and Blu-ray from Music Box Films. on August 18. Bonus features include Interview Featurette with director François Ozon and actors Benjamin Voisin and Rebecca Marder; Costumes & Lighting Tests; Deleted Scenes & Outtakes; and Poster Featurette.