The Stranger: LFF Film Review
I love Joel Edgerton so I will watch him in anything – hence why I rocked up to see the Australian crime drama The Stranger without knowing anything about it.
The film begins with Henry Teague (Sean Harris), a drifter who meets a man named Paul (Steve Mouzakis) on a bus and he offers him work – of the illegal kind – with mid-level gangster and undercover cop Mark (Edgerton). Thomas M. Wright‘s drama follows Henry and Mark as they work together, all while a large-scale police operation is taking place to discover who kidnapped and killed a young boy eight years earlier.
This is an unconventional crime drama that doesn’t lay all its cards on the table for a long time. It withholds the true nature of Henry and Mark’s friendship for ages and you have to try and figure out what’s going on. Our patience is eventually rewarded and once everything is out in the open, it’s very gripping, interesting and exciting. So it’s a shame it takes such a slow and convoluted route to get there that I felt pretty bored. I’m not going to lie, I really struggled to stay awake!
Wright employs a lot of style flourishes to help create the mood of his piece and reinforce the gloomy atmosphere. Some of his visual decisions are unexpected and jarring, and I didn’t love the loud bursts of jangly music.
Edgerton is excellent as the brooding, mysterious Mark, who feels the pressure and the mental toll of keeping his true identity hidden. Harris often plays terrifying, creepy and disturbed people and does the same here as Henry, who has a very unsettling presence.
The Stranger becomes an interesting and thrilling police procedural in the final 30-40 minutes but you have to persevere through the slow and dull parts to get there.
On Netflix now