Film Adaptations of Albert Camus’ “The Stranger”

Here are some excerpts from my essay published in the Turkish Journal of Film Studies, June 2026. The full text can be found here:

https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/6159178

The text explores existential alienation through various cultural adaptations of The Stranger by Albert Camus, demonstrating how the same philosophical core is reinterpreted across contexts. In the Turkish film by Zeki Demirkubuz, alienation appears as emotional detachment and passivity, with the protagonist wrongly punished due to society’s inability to understand his indifference, reflecting Turkey’s cultural tension between East and West. The Italian adaptation by Luchino Visconti emphasizes angoscia, a deep existential anguish tied to sensuality and the awareness of death, highlighting a more emotionally intense response to absurd existence. In Argentina, the opera adaptation transforms the narrative into a sensory and musical experience, using minimalist techniques and physical objects to express existential themes in a non-verbal, artistic language. Meanwhile, the 2025 French film by François Ozon reinterprets the story through a postcolonial and feminist perspective, foregrounding colonial injustice and giving identity to the previously unnamed Arab victim, although this shift is criticized for moving away from Camus’s original focus on absurdism and moral ambiguity. Overall, the text argues that existential alienation manifests differently depending on cultural and artistic frameworks, proving the flexibility and lasting relevance of Camus’s philosophy.

One of the great novels of the twentieth century is The Stranger by Albert Camus, the French philosopher known for his existentialist views on alienation. Currently, François Ozon’s new film adaptation of The Stranger is playing in movie theaters. The Stranger has been adapted across different media by creators from Algeria, Turkey, Italy, Argentina, and France. In this essay, I will briefly interpret the five versions to gain insight into the specific conditions of existential alienation in each national culture…

In the novella, the protagonist and first-person narrator, Meursault, shoots and kills a nameless Arab man on a beach during a hot summer, with the sun glaring in his eyes. The philosopher and author Camus, who grew up in urban poverty in Algiers, was from a family of the so-called Pieds-Noirs, French settlers in Algeria. Leftist literary theorists in the tradition of post-colonial criticism have often claimed that the disregard for the life of the victim of Meursault’s crime shows that Camus was a racist. The Algerian writer Kamel Daoud wrote a retelling of The Stranger’s fictional events, titled The Meursault Investigation (2013), which recounts the story from the perspective of Harun, Meursault’s victim’s brother. The dehumanization of Camus’s Arab, who is gazed upon as “other” to the white Frenchman, is challenged by giving the Arab the human name Musa…

The film directed by French filmmaker François Ozon was released in 2025. The film is shot entirely in black and white. Actor Benjamin Voisin plays Meursault, and Rebecca Marder plays Marie. One of the film’s main goals is to translate Camus’s literary art, as expressed in words, into a parallel cinematic form. Ozon largely succeeds in that ambition. The film is an aesthetic masterpiece. It is visually stunning. The recreation of 1930s Algiers is brilliantly executed (although the film was shot in Morocco)…

It is a beautiful film, but I think it betrays Camus by focusing on colonialism. Camus was always a critic of French colonialism, but in the late 1950s, he advocated a peaceful solution and did not support the Algerian Revolution. For better or worse, Meursault is, and has always been regarded as, an existentialist hero. He lives in the moment. He refuses to say anything untrue, though this attitude can be self-damaging. He loves life itself, as shown in his contemplation of insects. His atheistic speech at the end about the meaning of life, his rejection of religious dogma, his critique of capital punishment, and his eventual aggression toward the priest are especially compelling. But he has no thoughts about the colonial situation. Nothing about politics or morality…

In my view, there is no need to give the Arab a name, as Daoud does in The Meursault Investigation and as Ozon follows suit. Yes, Daoud and Ozon are perfectly entitled to do so. It reflects their political worldview and anti-colonialist values. I have nothing against it. But I would not have done it. In my view, it is disrespectful to Camus because Camus was obviously not a
classic postcolonial thinker. Whatever one may think of his late-1950s position on the Algerian War, his stance at that time expressed one of the major concerns of his philosophy of rebellion: questioning the moral illegitimacy of murder in the sense of “the ends justify the means.” No political goal can justify the taking of the lives of bystanders to the conflict…

Another way to show that it is wrong to give the Arab a name is to reflect on the fact that Meursault himself has less than a name. He has no first name – throughout the novel. This is important. Camus knew what he was doing. It is part of the narrative’s general atmosphere of existential alienation. The Arab, without a name, is connected to Meursault, who has no first name. Plus, we
know how important Kafka was for Camus (see the section “Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka” in The Myth of Sisyphus). Kafka’s (1998a, 1998b) protagonists are named Josef K. (in The Trial) and K. (in The Castle)…

The French filmmaker creates an aesthetic cinematic masterpiece, renders Camus “politically correct,” assuages French guilt over its historical colonization of Algeria, yet neglects to consider the relation of The Stranger to Camus’s overall position opposing “revolutionary violence.”