On the surface The Stranger appears to be the latest entry into a small cluster of distinctive Australian films that explore real-life criminality and the toxic masculinity that fuels everyday violence. Evoking films such as Rowan Woods’s The Boys (1998) and Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown (2011), The Stranger combines bleak and dark cinematography with an acting style and script that emphasises the banal and everyday ways people communicate with each other, which is all the more terrifying when they casually slip into a way of thinking and behaving that is so shockingly brutal. However, as much as The Stranger belongs to this kind of gritty social-realist crime thriller, it is also a complex film about identity where the two male protagonists become so tangled up in the versions of themselves they wish to project versus their true natures that The Stranger also has much in common with the psychological horror of many of David Lynch’s films or even Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.
CINEMA AUTOPSY 