Movie Review : The Stranger (2022)
We love to tell ourselves stories about evil. Because we need to believe that it exists, so that good also does. Chaos is somehow a difficult concept to understand and accept in a Judeo-Christian society, but it's undeniable if you spend more than twenty-four hours all the time. People die all the time for reasons that could've been avoided. The Stranger is a movie about that chaos among humans.
The Stranger tells the story of a Mr. Big operation. A police procedure invented in Canada where the suspect of a cold case is convinced to join a fictitious criminal organization that puts pressure on them in different ways to confess past crimes. In this case, Henry Teague (Sean Harris) is suspected of a little boy's murder and subsequently enrolled into a shadowy organization and given several opportunities by its members, including Mark (Joel Edgerton) to come clean. Spoiler: he's quite reluctant to do so.
Engineering Hell for Terrible People
This is a rather straightforward movie, where a bloke that seems decent at first hand is thrown through the wringer and revealed to be a pedophile and a child murderer. Many of you entertain the fantasy of torturing and violating pedophile, but I can't conceptualize a punishment being tougher than this. At least not in the short term: the creation of a harsh and demanding reality, where both your survival and your self-worth are reliant on someone who wants to use you.
Without the context of pedophilia, it's difficult not to feel for Henry who embraces an insane situation where he doesn't have a fucking clue about anything because he doesn't anywhere else to go. This is probably where co-writer and director Thomas M. Wright wanted to take us, but this is appropriately disorienting. When you learn that Henry is a pedophile scumbag, it challenges your own world view from an intuitive standpoint. Most of us can't read people for this and The Stranger is a sullen reminder of that.
Somehow, the whole "catching a pedophile" angle takes the backseat to this weird, shadowy netherworld the cops created around Henry. This weird netherworld where no one really exists. It's quite uncomfortable, but in a good way? Something seems fishy from the get-go about the situation Henry finds himself in, but as the artificiality of the world around him is gradually reveals and the horrible truth emerges, it reconstructs the events of the movie for you. Your perception is put on trial as much as Henry.
But it is good?
Not gonna lie: this is a pretty good movie. The Stranger has a silky, shadowy atmosphere that never really feels threatening, but this somehow adds to the wrongness of it all? It’s not quite a character study because no one in this film is real (not even in the context of the narrative), but it's a relationship study where authenticity and transactional behavior are at odds. It's not the most action packed, user-friendly proposition out there, but it does deliver efficiently on its promise.
I like Joel Edgerton as much as the next guy, but so much of the oddness of The Stranger lies on Sean Harris' existentially confused wildman act. He's a really gifted actor at portraying incertitude, street smarts and oddball sensibility. The most evil killers are always the most disappointing ones visually and Harris' interpretation of a killer who really exists feels appropriately bland and weird and off-putting. Somehow everything is fake, but him…. yet he looks like the odd man out. Not an easy feat to pull off.
*
The Stranger isn't a movie for everyone. Some of you will find it boring as shit, others will be disturbed into a state of complete catatonia. You appreciation will depend on your stomach for tension and atmosphere because that's really all it delivers. But it delivers it competently. An Australian movie where nothing really happens where you spend two hours feeling weird towards a pedophile is not the sexiest proposition, but seekers of a particular kind of weird, sophisticated thrills will get it right away.
