Credits: Elena Ternovaya / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
At 28, Benjamin Voisin steps into Meursault in The Stranger by Albert Camus, directed by François Ozon, in theaters on October 29, 2025. Screened at the Venice Film Festival, this black-and-white drama, an adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, filmed in Tangier to recreate 1938 Algiers, asks our present: “Don’t act, be.” Between acting minimalism and Camusian modernity, it paints a portrait of a man who refuses to fake it.
What The News Says: A Film, a Date, a Gamble
Under a bright blue sky, Benjamin Voisin, 28, walks along the edge of an invisible line: the one where youth meets the classics. On this nationwide release on October 29, 2025, The Stranger by François Ozon arrives in theaters after the 2025 Venice Film Festival. The film The Stranger, inspired by Camus, is shot in black and white. It casts the actor as Meursault. This character is a clear-eyed silhouette who resists lies. A gamble for the times: revisit Albert Camus without overplaying it, while embracing the moral vertigo of the story.
A Contemporary Actor, a César, a Trajectory
Made known by Summer of 85, after Lost Illusions, Benjamin Voisin has built a fast but patient career. 2022 César for Most Promising Actor, he stands out through a presence that refuses showiness. Neither distant star nor “leading man” heartthrob, he seeks out areas of friction: doubt, momentum, fragility. In recent interviews, he speaks of an initiation trial: becoming Meursault to better understand that intimate refusal of social theater. Nothing demonstrative: a face, silences, a walk in the sun.
From Ozon to Camus: Fidelity and Distance
François Ozon approaches The Stranger with a simple principle: not to make the work “up to date,” but to make its modernity visible. The staging favors ellipses, the brutal clarity of framing, distance. The shots seem to wait for Meursault to breathe, then slip away. Ozon is not looking for philosophical overinterpretation; he restores an experience. The trial is not a speech, it is a theater of gazes. Faced with that, Meursault stays close to the letter, to the naked truth of what he feels or does not feel.
An Adaptation Designed as Presence
On screen, Meursault remains a man who refuses to play along. His active passivity—walking, smoking, loving, shooting—does not tell a moral lesson, but a relationship to the world. The film establishes a mineral rhythm: no heavy-handed psychology, an economy of gestures, restrained words. This aesthetic of the interval lets the violence of events emerge. The sea and the sky form an unforgiving frame; dazzling light is part of the story, like something to think with.
Black and White: Light as Judgment
Black and white places the story in a suspended time. It strips 1930s Algeria of exotic iconography and brings it back to contrasts: scorched whites, dense shadows, faces like stones. Light becomes a court of judgment. In the heat, the slightest movement seems irreversible. This formal choice does not museum-ify the novel; it lays it bare. The “strangeness” is not a concept: it is what the camera records.
Tangier, a Recreated Algiers
Filming took place in Tangier, Morocco, recreating 1938 Algiers. The topography, volumes, and whitewashed walls contribute to this concrete illusion: finding a city without mimicking it. The nearby sea, the terraces, the murmur of the streets make up the film’s sensory givens. There, you can recognize a Mediterranean crossed by wind, dust, and harsh light. This setting is not decorative: it creates the truth of gestures and choices.
Acting Direction: “Don’t Act, Be”
The method remains minimalist. François Ozon is said to have repeated the instruction: “Don’t act, be.” Nothing showy, but a discipline: isolate the actor, clear the set of chatter, build silence before “action.” Benjamin Voisin speaks of weeks of immersion: walking alone, rereading the text, learning not to fill in what the scene does not call for. The body becomes a metronome, the time of the shot, a promise of mystery.
A Crushing Role, an Interpretation Threaded With Doubt
Playing Meursault means resisting emphasis. The actor rejects a “stoic” stiffness and searches for human opacity. The face explains nothing, but holds. Sadness, fear, desire pass without display. In the trial scene, speech does not redeem; it accuses. This restraint builds rare intensity: not commenting on one’s own presence, letting the event come.
Venice, the Audience Test
At the 2025 Venice Film Festival, the reception praised the film’s calm radicalism. In competition, The Stranger stood out as both an actor’s proposition and a directorial gesture. Far from flashy effects, Ozon and Voisin champion a cinema of perception. The gamble is clear: not to explain Camus, but to expose him to today’s gaze.
Camus, the Colonial Question, and the Blind Spot
Returning to Camus in 2025 means confronting a heated debate: colonial Algeria, the unspoken place of Arab voices, justice filtered through an order. The film does not sidestep this context; it marks it through its framing. It does so too through the casting and the social space of the trial. Without didactic pleading, the staging lets you feel what is missing and what weighs on it. This tension—faithfulness to the text, today’s critical gaze—gives the adaptation its scope.
The Present Tense of a Classic
The Stranger is not a monument; it is a risk. The team chooses the precision of gestures: a cigarette, a walk at noon, a shot that splits time. Benjamin Voisin agrees to let go: less “acting” than letting it happen. François Ozon films against rhetoric: sharp shots, clean ellipses, silences that settle the matter. This present given to Camus explains the project’s relevance: a classic that breathes.
Reception and Circulation
The French release on October 29, 2025 opens up broad circulation: downtown theaters, nationwide circuits, university events, film clubs. The “high school” audience meets the readers who’ve always been there. The running time (about 2 hours) keeps a lean pace, the cinematography favors high contrast, the score moves forward through restraint. The whole makes for a film that is welcoming, but demanding.
Portrait in Blue: The Work Rather Than the Role
Off camera, Benjamin Voisin talks method: listening, rereading, stepping away a little, then coming back. He does not turn Meursault into a career totem; he sees him as a tool: learning to light less in order to show better. Blue—sky, sea, night—returns like a subtle note, a state of being. It frames the actor without tying him down. What comes next will be theater, film, perhaps returns to filmmakers with character.
What This Film Changes
For François Ozon, it is another stone in a very written filmography: a classic confronted with an ethic of framing. For Benjamin Voisin, it is a baptism: carrying a thankless role without easy seductions and turning it into a presence. For the audience, it is proof that a novel read at 17 can pierce the surface of cinema. That happens in 2025, without slogans.
Why Now?
Because a classic is not a relic. Because strangeness—the refusal to lie, the fear of explaining—still speaks to us in a world saturated with images and opinions. The Stranger in theaters in 2025 is a way of asking the question without closing it off: what is a man who does not play along? It also gives responsibility back to the gaze.
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