At 28, Benjamin Voisin takes on the role of Meursault in The Stranger by Albert Camus, directed by François Ozon, in theaters on October 29, 2025. Presented at the Venice Film Festival, this black-and-white drama, an adaptation of The Stranger by Albert Camus, filmed in Tangier to recreate Algiers in 1938, questions our present: "don’t act, be." Between actor minimalism and Camusian modernity, a portrait of a man who refuses to cheat.
What the news says: a film, a date, a gamble
Under a clear blue sky, Benjamin Voisin, 28 years old, walks along an invisible line: where youth touches the classics. On this national release of October 29, 2025, The Stranger by François Ozon hits theaters, after the Venice Film Festival 2025. The film The Stranger, inspired by Camus, is shot in black and white. It entrusts the actor with the role of Meursault. This character is a lucid silhouette resistant to lies. A gamble of the era: revisiting Albert Camus without exaggeration, embracing the moral vertigo of the story.
An actor of today, a César, a trajectory
Revealed by Summer of 85, having passed through Lost Illusions, Benjamin Voisin has built a fast yet patient career. César for Most Promising Actor 2022, he stands out with a presence that refuses showiness. Neither a distant star nor a "young lead," he seeks areas of friction: doubt, momentum, fragility. In recent interviews, he speaks of an initiatory trial: becoming Meursault to better understand this intimate refusal of social comedy. Nothing demonstrative: a face, silences, a walk in the sun.
From Ozon to Camus: fidelity and shift
François Ozon approaches The Stranger with a simple principle: not to make the work "trendy," but to make its modernity visible. The direction favors ellipses, the brutal clarity of frames, the distance. The shots seem to wait for Meursault to breathe, then slip away. Ozon does not seek philosophical overinterpretation, he restores an experience. The trial is not a discourse, it’s a theater of glances. In the face of this, Meursault adheres to the letter, to the bare truth of what he feels or does not feel.
An adaptation conceived as presence
On screen, Meursault remains a man who refuses to act. His active passivity walking, smoking, loving, shooting does not tell a moral, but a relationship to the world. The film establishes a mineral rhythm: no heavy psychology, an economy of gestures, restrained words. This aesthetic of the interval lets the violence of facts emerge. The sea and the sky form an implacable frame, the glare is part of the story, like a material to think about.
Black and white: light as judgment
The black and white places the story in a suspended temporality. It tears Algeria of the 1930s from exotic iconography to bring it back to contrasts: burnt whites, dense shadows, faces like stones. The light becomes an instance of judgment. In the heat, the slightest movement seems irreversible. This formal choice does not museumify the novel, it literally exposes it. The "strangeness" is not a concept: it is what the camera records.
Tangier, a reconstructed Algiers
The filming took place in Tangier (Morocco), recreating Algiers in 1938. The topography, the volumes, the whitewashed walls contribute to this concrete illusion: finding a city without mimicking it. The nearby sea, the terraces, the murmur of the streets compose the film’s sensitive data. One recognizes a Mediterranean crossed by winds, dust, light that snaps. This setting is not decorative: it creates the truth of gestures and choices.
The direction of actors: "Don’t act, be"
The method remains minimalist. François Ozon reportedly repeated the instruction: "Don’t act, be." Nothing ostentatious, but a discipline: isolating the actor, depriving the set of chatter, installing silence before "action." Benjamin Voisin speaks of weeks of immersion: walking alone, rereading the text, learning not to fill what the scene does not require. The body becomes a metronome, the time of the shot, a promise of enigma.
An overwhelming role, an interpretation in the flow of doubt
To embody Meursault is to resist emphasis. The actor refuses the "stoic" tension and seeks human opacity. The face explains nothing, but holds. Sadness, fear, desire pass without demonstration. In the trial scene, the speech does not redeem; it accuses. This restraint builds a rare intensity: not commenting on one’s own presence, letting the event come.
Venice, the trial of the public
At the Venice Film Festival 2025, the reception praised the film’s calm radicality. In competition, The Stranger established itself as both an actor’s proposition and a directorial gesture. Far from grandstanding, Ozon and Voisin defend a cinema of perception. The gamble is readable: not to explain Camus, to expose him to today’s gaze.
Camus, the colonial question, and the blind spot
Returning to Camus in 2025 means confronting a lively debate: colonial Algeria, the "unthought" of Arab voices, justice through the prism of an order. The film does not evade this context, but it designates it through its frames. It also does so through the casting and the social space of the trial. Without didactic pleading, the direction lets us hear what is missing and what weighs. This tension fidelity to the text, today’s critical view gives its scope to the adaptation.
The present of a classic
The Stranger is not a monument, it’s a risk. The team chooses the accuracy of gestures: a cigarette, a walk at noon, a shot that splits time. Benjamin Voisin agrees to let go: less "acting" than letting happen. François Ozon films against rhetoric: sharp shots, clear ellipses, silences that decree. This present given to Camus explains the relevance of the project: a classic that breathes.
Reception and circulation
The French release on October 29, 2025 opens a wide circulation: downtown theaters, national circuits, university events, film clubs. The "high school" audience rubs shoulders with longtime readers. The duration (about 2 hours) maintains a lean tempo, the photography favors high contrasts, the soundtrack progresses by retentions. The whole composes a film that is hospitable, yet demanding.
Portrait in blue: work rather than role
Off-camera, Benjamin Voisin talks method: listening, rereading, absenting oneself a bit, then returning. He does not erect Meursault as a career totem, he sees it as a tool: learning to illuminate less to show better. The blue sky, sea, night returns as a discreet note, a state. It frames the actor without binding him. The future will be theater, cinema, perhaps returns to filmmakers of character.
What this film changes
For François Ozon, it’s an additional stone in a well-written filmography: a classic confronted with an ethics of framing. For Benjamin Voisin, it’s a baptism: carrying an ungrateful role without easy seductions and making it a presence. For the audience, it’s the proof that a novel read at 17 can pierce the surface of cinema. This happens in 2025, without slogans.
Why now?
Because a classic is not a relic. Since strangeness the refusal to lie, the fear of explaining speaks to us of a saturated world. This world is filled with images and opinions. The Stranger in cinema in 2025, is posing the question without closing it: what is a man who does not act? It is also about giving back to the gaze its responsibility.