With the true-crime renaissance in full swing over on the small screen, it feels appropriate that a similar spike should be felt in the moviehouse. “The Stranger,” the sophomore feature from Aussie TV guy Thomas M. Wright that premiered yesterday in Un Certain Regard, is the latest film to try and scratch that particular itch — try, alas, being the watchword. Unraveling mystery, throat-snatching tension, tragedy and trauma in abundance; you’ll find little of that here, at least for the first hour, where the film veers between frail tangents and manifold branches that make the whole thing an annoying chore. A stronger second half comes some way in making the ordeal worth it if you haven’t already dropped off for a tactical mid-fest snooze.
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A ratty-looking dude (Sean Harris, handily best in show) gets on a coach in the Aussie outback, shifty-eyed and weary. Someone else, another drifter, starts up a conversation with him; Harris reveals himself to be Henry, a shady one-time criminal just looking for a break. So thank god for this serendipitous meet-cute because the drifter, Paul, is keen to give Henry a break, offering him an ambiguous job that naturally pays cash. “No violence,” Henry says, in his gruff, gravelly tone. No violence indeed: this work is delivery only, a simple A-to-B role shipping high-value product for the Australian criminal underground. As quickly as he entered, Paul is hooked off stage right, replaced by Henry’s hoarse and beardy facsimile, Mark (Joel Edgerton).
Between their prolonged car journeys and mutual appreciation for Viking-esque facial hair, Mark and Henry become something like buddies, trading jibes and manifold utterances of “cunt” per Aussie tradition. Then comes the first big reveal: Mark isn’t Mark at all, but a codenamed agent for a clandestine state office investigating the disappearance and murder of a child in 2002. With a history of wanton child abuse going back to the mid-’90s, Henry is the only suspect, but — for whatever ill-defined reason — wringing an admission out of him demands one of the more elaborate sting operations committed to celluloid. The whole force is involved, pretending to be a fraternal cohort of Bad Guys at a motel-set criminal rendezvous to win Henry’s trust and, eventually, his uncoerced confession.
The tragic true-life inspiration here, covered in Kate Kyriacou’s true crime tome “The Sting: The Undercover Operation That Caught Daniel Morcombe’s Killer,” is gut-churning stuff. A young boy, the titular Morcombe, was abducted by a known pedophile and murdered before his disappearance could even be reported by his parents. At the very least, then, “The Stranger” doesn’t feel exploitative. As the narrative splits to cover the decades-long police effort to secure Henry’s arrest, the stakes weigh heavy, bringing the psychological toll front-and-center. Edgerton shines here, variously subdued and evocative of the wild psychosis of Joaquin Phoenix in “You Were Never Really Here” (minus the blood-smeared hammer, but keeping the grizzly wildman machismo).
The problem lies in the unwieldy nature of the first act. As the pieces finally fall into place and the thrills step up a notch, the final act is genuinely compelling. Harris is another highlight, selling the hell out of his subject’s neuroses and morphing into unsettling ambivalence over the terrors committed at his hand. Formally, “The Stranger” is mostly conventional, producing serviceable images with Sam Chiplin’s camera and an accessible edit akin to one of the aforementioned TV true-crime dramas. The film finds a little verve; Edgerton is put through the imagined ringer in a handful of unnerving dream sequences, and a motif featuring the mountainous crime scene is interesting (until it isn’t). But for all of the interesting twists and turns, as the story comes to its smoky conclusion, one can’t imagine who in the audience will make it to the payoff. [C]
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