The Stranger (2022)

Score: 3.5 / 5

An intensive character study, The Stranger is one of those seemingly random Netflix releases that nobody hears about but absolutely should. It's an understated crime drama -- and it's Australian, which for me correlates to a certain excellence in the craft anyway -- of the sort that will almost certainly alienate anyone who loves true crime miniseries or podcasts. Those tend to be fast, wild, and filled with frisson; this one is pensive, patient, and haunting. It doesn't make its story easy to access, and it certainly doesn't feel rewarding or particularly satisfying. In fact, I'd compare its aesthetic more to a Denis Villeneuve film (like Prisoners), as it seems more concerned with atmosphere, character, and form than with plot or entertainment.

Sean Harris plays Henry Teague, who in the first scene meets someone on the bus who offers him a job opportunity. If he was played by Liam Neeson, you'd scoff and say we've already seen this story before; we know it's a true crime story, and we might assume he joins a "one last time" criminal enterprise to get enough money to finally escape. Not that we're given any details like that, but the film knows what we expect. Harris, being Harris, immediately imbues the character with a suspicious energy, facilitated effectively by his gravelly whisper of a voice and vacant, ghostly gaze. There are major wheels spinning behind that façade, but all we get is the impression of horror. That's why he's a different character than what Neeson might bring to the film. Neeson would be a hero. We're not sure about Harris.

Which is good, because (SPOILER ALERT) he's actually the villain. Not the antagonist, mind you, but still the villain. Henry Teague is a fictionalized version of the real-life main suspect of one of the most notorious missing person cases in Australia's history. By the time we find out -- some twenty minutes in -- that the people around him are undercover informants and investigators, we realize they've been hunting this guy for a while. The elaborate sting operation is headed by Mark Frame (Joel Edgerton), who poses as a criminal organizer in order to get Teague a job and then catch him red-handed. They're convinced he murdered a child, but a lack of evidence means they can't just arrest him. So they develop this false criminal underworld in order to lure Teague in, get him comfortable, and hope that he will confess to his crime or enact a new one they can book him for and then continue the investigation. Apparently this methodology is (or was) legal in Australia; I think it would not be in the US, but I haven't taken a civics or criminal justice class in many years!

For a police procedural, this does not fit the bill. It feels more like an arthouse film, one whose deliberate pacing makes it feel more like a waking nightmare than true crime. Occasional sharp edits cut into what amount to dream sequences or montages, and we're never quite sure if it's meant to convey a dissociative streak in Teague's mind or if it's insight into Frame's fracturing mind under the pressure of the investigation and befriending a child killer. Writer and director Thomas M. Wright skillfully tells the story unlike any other police procedural I've seen, and more than once I wanted to pull out a stopwatch just to calculate times of the long takes and sometimes the time between spoken lines. It's a quiet, calculated film meant to destabilize our awareness of genre conventions. And then there's the chilling score that drones on and sinks under your skin, much as it does for both the main characters, who (as you can see in the promotional poster below) are by design frighteningly similar in appearance. After all, your own reflection is your safest confidant, right? One wonders what Freud might make of this movie in terms of the uncanny.