The Stranger is a 2020 film directed by the Australian Thomas M. Wright. On the evidence of this picture (now available on Netflix), Wright is an excellent director with an unusual and uncompromising film technique. He is the author of the script said to be based on "true events" -- the story told by the movie is chronicled in a book by Kate Kyriaco called The Sting. In essence, the movie is a sort of police procedural, although set in a hellish void filled with sinister bureaucrats indistinguishable from the criminals that they are chasing. The movie is a paranoid thriller and seems most closely similar to pictures made in the seventies in Hollywood by figures like Francis Coppola and Alan Pakula -- indeed, the icy cold veneer presented by the picture with its gloomy interiors and empty landscapes seems influenced by Francis Coppola's paranoid The Conversation.
The Stranger is shot in such a way as to conceal its plot, although after about twenty minutes, the viewer will begin to understand what is happening. On first encounter, the picture seems to document a chance meeting on a airplane between two hirsute Australian gentlemen, both of them middle-aged. The plane is mostly empty and very dark -- it's like a black tunnel to nowhere, the first sign that much of the imagery in the film will be heavily stylized and, even, abstract. We see a strange conical mound, but there is nothing to signify scale and so we don't know if we are looking at a mountain or just a heap of pyramidal-shaped rubbish. On landing, the two men becomes friends until, suddenly, and, in a disconcerting change of narrative direction, one of the guys, who has acted as a benefactor to the other stranger, a man named Henry, vanishes from the film -- this is after we have seen the friendly man mysteriously using dye to darken his hair. (This makes Henry a little suspicious). Henry has been introduced to a group of enigmatic criminals and invited to join them -- although the nature of the criminal enterprise is never really specified. The men meet Henry in various hotels and indicate that they need to vet him before he can become a member of their gang. The crook on the airplane is now replaced by a melancholy man named Mark Frame. We see Frame with his son, a boy who seems to be about eleven -- Frame is distracted, a remote, absent father, although he seems to genuinely love his son. There's no wife in evidence although, from time to time, she is mentioned -- apparently, Frame is divorced.
The film doesn't make much effort to conceal it's central conceit and so I'm not hesitant to reveal this plot twist here: Frame (and the other crooks) are, in fact, undercover police officers. Their objective is to lure Henry into confessing to a crime that he committed eight years previous -- the abduction and apparent murder of a little boy named James Liston, apparently a celebrated and notorious crime Downunder. It's been pretty obvious that Henry is a prime suspect in this investigation -- in fact, it turns out that he almost beat a child to death in an assault a few years before Liston vanished. But there's no body and no proof sufficient to connect this prime suspect to the crime. So the cops have constructed an elaborate ruse, involving a dozens of operatives, to seduce Henry into admitting the murder and leading them to the body. This is revealed in stages throughout the movie. The disturbing aspect of this plot is that we come to sympathize with Henry, a classic half-mad loner, and the cops are generally thuggish, cruel, and have no difficulty at all playing the roles of mobsters -- in fact, they seem to have been born and bred to be criminals. Mark Frame, the police protagonist entrusted with befriending the child-murderer, is a heavy drinker and seems to be declining into serious depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. He can't sleep and is afflicted by terrible nightmares in which his dreams are haunted by the uncanny Henry -- a strange, unpredictable, and pathetic mad man. (At one point, Henry sexually gropes Mark -- later, Henry says that when he was in prison he was fascinated by amputee porn and he remarks: "You seem to me to be kind of an amputee.") Frame becomes fearful that Henry will discover the plot and assault his own son. He keeps repeating a therapeutic mantra about breathing and out and releasing the dark energy on exhalation -- at various times, the film visualizes this by showing us horrific clouds of smoke and fire, possibly a reference as well to the wild-fires that have burned to destructively in Australia recently. Henry literally has trouble breathing -- he uses an inhaler. In some ways, Henry is more sympathetic than Mark. Henry dances for Mark seductively, swaying his body to a tune called "Blue Trojan." (Mark has said that he doesn't like music.) On one occasion, Henry, who claims to have been raised as a charismatic evangelical, simulates seizures -- these would be the sort of spasms that someone speaking in tongues might display and the spectacle is truly alarming. Henry lives in a remote bungalow (he says his wife is suffering from anxiety and depression and she is nowhere to be seen); the bungalow is similar to the strange house where Mark lives, a place with odd stucco and plaster entries shaped with arched tops. Henry wants to be trained as a pilot and there are some peculiar scenes at a remote airfield. There is concern that the "sting" is taking too long to develop and that Henry may "fly the coop." So one of the more aggressive cops takes over for Mark (who is sidelined in film's last half hour -- also a surreal development because Mark seems to be the film's main character.) A coroner's subpoena is served on Henry (this turns out not to be his real name) and the fake crooks tell him that he has to confess to them, not so that he can be judged, but so that the gangsters will know if he exposes their criminal enterprise to law enforcement scrutiny. Henry confesses and is arrested. In the film's last ten minutes, many cops search the area where Henry killed the child, looking for clues of the murder. There's been a flood and the landscape -- it seems to be a tree plantation under the strange conical mountain (a great monolith of granite) --has changed. But, at last, some trace of the crime is found.
The Stranger is glacially cold and abstract, although it has some genuinely disturbing and frightening scenes. In its pace and mise-en-scene, the movie resembles The Investigation, a Danish mini-series that was similarly reticent and resolutely non-sensational about the effects of a terrible crime. (The Investigation is also about a true crime -- the murder of the journalist Kim Wall aboard a home-made submarine built by the killer, Thomas Madsen.) The movie is constructed from tiny clues and gestures: the murderer is said to have been standing like "a stork with one leg crossed behind the other" and leaning against a wall when the child vanished. At the end of the movie, Henry stands in that posture leaning against a tree. The dozens of cops searching for forensic evidence are told to "raise a hand if you find anything." We see a row of police, maybe about ten men in orange jumpsuits, digging with trowels in mucky field. There is a reverse shot taken from behind the searchers. And, of course, after a long time -- probably 15 seconds -- someone cautiously raises his hand. As in The Investigation, we never see what has been found -- the horrors are kept scrupulously off-screen. This sort of thing is beyond reproach and the clammy atmosphere in The Stranger is exceedingly effective. One of the film's disturbing aspects is that shots are designed to create suspense about whether Henry will discover the elaborate plot -- but the plot is so all-encompassing, it can't be discovered; rather, everything is just blithely accommodated to the sting; when Henry walks in on bunch of police plotting against him, the cops simply say that they are also gangsters and working on designing a crime. There is literally nothing that can reveal the conspiracy to Henry -- the conspiracy is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It's an impressive movie, but there's a sense that, in a way, the film is as pointless and nihilistic as the crime that it concerns. As an exercise in style, however, The Stranger is well worth the viewer's attention.
(The events in the film involve the murder of a boy named Daniel Morcombe in Queensland, Australia. The killer, Brett Parker Cowie, was, indeed, captured as a result of a very complicated sting operation, a so-called Mr. Big ruse in which the suspect is inducted into a pretend criminal gang and encouraged to confess to the gang's leader, "Mr. Big." The family is incensed about this film and has demanded that the name of real victim be omitted -- the little boy is called James Liston in the movie, but the reference to Kate Kyriaco's book in the closing titles does show his name. The peculiar looking monolith in the film is Mount Beerwagh in the Glass House Mountains in Queensland, the place where Cowie concealed his victim's corpse. Henry is modeled closely on Brett Cowie.)
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