The Stranger – first-look review

Over 50 under­cov­er police offi­cers were involved in the hunt for Daniel Morcombe’s killer. The 13-year-old boy went miss­ing from a bus stop in Queens­land a few weeks before Christ­mas; he had been on his way to get a hair­cut and shop for presents for his fam­i­ly. It feels impor­tant to men­tion this infor­ma­tion because Thomas M Wright’s psy­cho­log­i­cal dra­ma about the sting oper­a­tion that even­tu­al­ly caught his killer is a lit­tle light on details – as tends to be the case in true crime pro­ce­du­rals, there’s more empha­sis on the killer than his victim.

Hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly act­ed in Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake, Wright appears to have been influ­enced by the murky, slow-paced world and vio­lent that she cre­at­ed with Ger­ard Lee, and there are com­par­isons to be drawn between The Stranger and Justin Kurzel’s dra­mas about real Aus­tralian mur­der cas­es, Snow­town and Nitram.

Like Nitram, The Stranger attempts to han­dle the real-life case sen­si­tive­ly by chang­ing names, details and focus­ing more on the elab­o­rate under­cov­er case which final­ly brought Morcombe’s killer to jus­tice This with­hold­ing of infor­ma­tion makes it a lit­tle hard to fol­low, par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing time skips, and any­one not famil­iar with the Mor­combe case and sub­se­quent sting oper­a­tion might strug­gle to keep up. This approach does cre­ate a dark, fore­bod­ing atmos­phere – the sen­sa­tion of a film as tight­ly wound as a vio­lin string that might snap at any moment.

Joel Edger­ton plays Mark, the under­cov­er police­man tasked with befriend­ing mur­der sus­pect Hen­ry Teague (Sean Har­ris) in hopes of draw­ing out a mur­der con­fes­sion. The oper­a­tion involves mul­ti­ple juris­dic­tions and an intri­cate plan to con­vince Teague to reveal that he is liv­ing under a dif­fer­ent name and is in fact the man want­ed for mur­der in Queens­land. It’s some­times dif­fi­cult to fol­low all the twists and turns with­in the sto­ry, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en that Mark and Hen­ry aren’t the most forth­com­ing of men, but both do a sol­id job of con­vey­ing a lev­el of cool detach­ment (albeit for very dif­fer­ent reasons).

But ulti­mate­ly it’s dif­fi­cult to say what exact­ly The Stranger is bring­ing to an already flood­ed mar­ket. There are so many films that take cas­es ripped from the head­lines and attempt to pathol­o­gise the per­pe­tra­tors – Wright is more inter­est­ed in the psy­cho­log­i­cal toll on the man tasked with befriend­ing a killer, which should offer an inter­est­ing per­spec­tive, and there are some strik­ing images with­in The Stranger matched by its aes­thet­ic inten­si­ty, but the con­vo­lut­ed plot is with­hold­ing in a way that makes it dif­fi­cult to tru­ly con­nect with the sto­ry, as wor­thy a sub­ject it might be.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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