Thomas M Wright’s unconventional, captivating film sees Edgerton as an undercover cop trying to identify a child murderer, opposite the brilliant Sean Harris
A creeping sense of dread permeates the second feature film of writer/director Thomas M Wright, who burst out the gates with Acute Misfortune in 2018, which was not just a great biopic (of the artist Adam Cullen), but one of the best Australian films of the decade. The Stranger has a texture reminiscent of films by fellow Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel, particularly Snowtown and Nitram, with scaled-back colour schemes, compositions that are stylised – but never flashy – and graded in a slightly off-colour way, as if the characters have stained the surface of the film, contaminating it from the inside.
Our narrative pathway into this sophisticated, meditative picture is via Henry (Sean Harris), an ex-con and drifter who meets a stranger, Paul (Steve Mouzakis), on a bus; cinematographer Sam Chiplin creates a surreal theatricality by blackening out the space around them. Paul tells Henry he knows where he can find some work – not of the legal kind – and soon Henry has entered the web of Mark (Joel Edgerton), an undercover police officer posing as a mid-level gangster. The film spends a lot of time with Mark and Henry, and you’re not sure what either man is capable of.
