If there’s a chill in “The Stranger”—and there is, a gray-blue, suffocating fog that seeps in under the doors and seeps, ultimately, into your bones—it is not the chill of intellectual rigor, or even of well-honed genre machinery. No, what Thomas M. Wright (whose name, one suspects, is stiflingly respectable but also suspiciously absent from the pantheon of directors who actually terrify us) gives us is a thriller so restrained in its horror, so unsure of its own human subjects, that it might have been devised by police proceduralists who, after a long day filling out forms, briefly remembered they had souls. “The Stranger” is heavy with atmosphere, but the air is so thick it deadens more than it haunts.
You have to admire—or perhaps simply acknowledge—Sean Harris, whose Henry Teague operates in that singular register of Harris’s, all mumbly menace edged with pathetic need, the human equivalent of a lock clicking open on a cell door. Harris offers the film’s only real kernel of unpredictability: whether you want to be near this grubby little man or desperately wish someone would wash the frame clean of him. Joel Edgerton, sturdy as ever in undercover cop drag, seems to be running an experiment in how many kinds of aching, manly responsibility an actor can suggest with a heavy brow alone. The two dance—literally, sometimes, in the case’s only dollop of grace—around intimacy and dread, but for all the sleepless nights and shifting loyalties, you could die of thirst waiting for the movie to really let you understand either man. Even the film’s rare moments of openness—“the little dance scene,” as if the filmmakers felt guilty about it—are rationed out like painkillers in a puritan’s medicine cabinet.
Wright, to his credit and perhaps his woe, has an instinct for mood—a knack for the cold creak of a motel mattress or the steely fluorescence of highway detritus. The first half wraps itself with mystery, and there’s a deliciously queasy unease to not quite knowing who’s lying to whom, or why. But then the film reveals its secrets, far too early and much too eagerly: it knocks on the locked door between audience and story, flings it open, and stands back with an apologetic “well, there it is.” “The Stranger” mistakes confession for climax, when in fact the confession robs the movie of its soul, leaving the final act with the feeble pulse of a police briefing.
It’s almost as though—having decided to adapt this particular horror, with its national wound and tabloid notoriety—the filmmakers found themselves afraid to fully enter either the mind of the killer or the conscience of the man sent to catch him. The true-crime DNA gives the plot its procedures, but none of its emotional fire. Wright dangles the audience between the conventions of a “slow burn” procedural thriller (isn’t that the Australian way, these days?) and a more ambiguous, interior drama about loneliness, trust, and moral corrosion, but settles finally for neither: not a humanist drama, nor a crime film with cinematic teeth. Yes, the atmosphere “pulled me in,” but by the end it felt less like a film than the aftertaste of one—enough to prompt aimless internet searches just to figure out what you missed or, more unforgivably, what the filmmakers simply neglected to dramatize.
No, it’s not that the film is slow—God knows there’s nothing wrong with a slow movie if the tension tightens with every measured step. The problem is that “The Stranger” promises a slow build, then fumbles the payoff. The tension peaks and troughs with the bored regularity of a heart monitor during a nap; it builds, yes, but instead of snapping, it just…diffuses. Tension, and genre, are not mere formalities—they’re there to mask and then explode the banality of evil. Here, even the breakdowns feel pallid—subdued and solemnized into an ambiguous morality play, sans the actual drama.
I imagine the film resonated with the critics, those connoisseurs of potential, because it gestured toward seriousness, and ground its boot-heel into the grime of true crime without the vulgarity of dirty thrills. But I’m not convinced—this is a film that autopsies itself as it plays. “The Stranger” circles its characters like a dog sniffing an open wound, but never quite gets close enough to let us feel anything more than discomfort. Harris is extraordinary, Edgerton ruminatively decent, but the movie itself is as indecisive as its title. Mediocre, which in this company feels like the only real crime.
