The Stranger

dir: Thomas M. Wright

2022

This is not an easy review to write. It wasn’t an easy film to watch.

I have found with all the death and insanity of the last bunch of years that I really don’t have a lot of love for true crime stuff based on things that have actually happened. Same goes for war films. I find them very hard to watch at the moment.

Horror movies with underground monsters or kill crazy maniacs are fine, but “real” or true stuff is just too painful. This film, The Stranger, is very painful to watch.

It should be. I don’t know if it should have been made. I haven’t sorted through, in my head, the moral and ethical arguments about making a movie depicting the lengths the police went to in order to convict a man for the murder of a child. I don’t know if I should even mention the boy’s name, since the family not only had nothing to do with this production but actively spoke out against it.

Who owns the story? The parents? The boy, which ultimately means the parents? The cops? Does Australian society own the story? And by own I don’t mean who has the right to make “art” and profit from the story. I mean, whose story is it?

I don’t think anyone is comfortable saying that, despite being the main character here, and the subject of that most generic of titles, the man who killed that boy wouldn’t be considered to be the one who owns this story.

And yet it’s all about him, and not the boy.

He is depicted as he is depicted, and instead of being depicted as a monster, he is depicted as a revenant, as something or someone who’s barely there. He is a scarecrow, gaunt, with a scraggly beard. He is almost faded, and only tentatively interacts with the world around him. Other than smoking I have no idea what he even did before he was caught up in this incredible undercover operation.

This is not a deep character study. You will find nor see no reasons to sympathise with him.

He is an absence more than a presence. So to compensate, you need someone to compel him back into the world, to force him to interact with it in order to trip him up so that sweet justice can be served.

Seeing as I was familiar with this story from the reporting in the news on the ABC, there is no part of this extraordinary saga depicted here that comes as a surprise. Joel Edgerton plays Mark, a chap that offers some kind of shady seeming work to Henry (Sean Harris), and looks and acts throughout like an uncomfortable, grim crim. He is, as everyone who knows anything about the story already knows, one of a whole bunch of cops who were involved in convincing “Henry” that he was actually part of a massive organised crime syndicate.

So many cops are involved in setting Henry up that’s enough to make the fears of a paranoid schizophrenic seem perfectly justifiable. Like some kind of terrifying Truman Show, at certain stages there are dozens of cops just out of sight, often in the next room trying to record vision or sound from around Henry.

For 90 per cent of the film, though, it’s not necessarily that they’re trying to get him to slip up and say a particular thing: most of their efforts are to convince Henry that he’s done a lot of criminal stuff and earned a lot of money for an organization powerful enough to bribe cops and to be able to make his criminal past disappear. All they need to do is to get him to the point where he’s comfortable enough with them, but fearful enough of prosecution, to admit to the exact details of his crime so that they can be magically erased by the syndicate.

It sounds idiotic, doesn’t it, but apparently it worked. The drama for us is it has to be believable to him for it to be believable to us.

Let’s just say that it takes the filmmakers an incredibly long time to get to that particular fireworks factory.

Along the long way to getting there, we, the audience, are tormented. It’s strange that within the confines of the actual sting, there’s nothing going on that should warrant us feeling dread at every turn: Henry’s crimes are historical, and he seems too wrecked to do anything horrifying now. And yet the film constructs its scenes, constructs its paranoia such that we’re the ones who are uneasy; we’re the ones dreading the outcome if it doesn’t come to pass.

Unlike other undercover crime dramas, the tension isn’t really whether Mark is going to be found out to be Senior Detective Sergeant Fuckface or whatever his character’s actual name is: we’re not, I don’t think, scared on his behalf that Henry will find out who he really is and get revenge. And I don’t know if that’s just because I knew how this was going to turn out based on the court case. Mark’s psychological trauma seems to come from being terrified that something might happen to his young son who he shares custody with the kid’s mother, and from having to pretend to like Henry.

In order to be able to do so effectively, Mark pretty much shuts down as a person, drinks a fair few stubbies, and resists giving any part of himself away unless he absolutely has to. Henry asks him at one point what music he likes, and Mark stumbles through the most unconvincing of answers, saying stuff like “uh, don’t like no music, never… really…got music with words.”

I took that as him just not wanting this guy to know anything true about him. It does lead to the most awkward scene of the movie when Henry puts on some music and dances like…someone unfamiliar with the concept of dance.

The cops (other than Mark) are depicted as serious, sober, heroic and committed, and that’s just fucking tedious. I get that they’re the real heroes for doing their goddamn job, but it felt like a real soft-soaping of just how many bungles by the cops resulted in this investigation dragging out for as long as it did against someone who was no criminal mastermind.

The thing that you never really understand, even through watching this flick, even from following the news reporting, is how Henry got so sucked in by a bunch of people pretending to be crims who looked, spoke and acted, if any of that is accurate, just like cops anyway. Everyone they bring in to bolster Mark’s organised crime network looks and acts just like a fucking cop. At one point there’s a middle-aged guy with a paunch, a moustache and dead eyes who tells Henry he’s a cleaner (like Mr Wolf in Pulp Fiction), and he looked and spoke like he couldn’t have ever been anything else other than a cop in his life.

There’s only a pair of scenes that show there was any dissension between the cops as to how they were approaching the investigation, where one cop screams quite unprofessionally at one of his colleagues who’s been working to disprove Henry’s alibi from eight years ago, or the other elements they’ve been working on. I guess that’s meant to be realism, but he just ends up sounding like an arsehole, which I would never believe of a senior member of the boys in blue.

The stakes are clear, they don’t want him to get away, so we feel some relief in the end, but it a long road getting there, a long anxiety-inducing road which made me feel pretty unwell while watching, which was the intended effect, I guess. I can’t fault them for making us feel horrible, since it is a horrible story about something truly awful that happened to a poor kid. Anyone who ever saw a photo of the boy will ever be haunted, like we’re shown that these characters whether cops or crims are haunted, not by Henry, but by this amorphous, inchoate specter that looms just off camera, just out of sight that could, at any moment, hurt all our children.

Sean Harris’s performance is probably a great one playing such an awful person, but I just wanted to crawl away from the screen, get far away from him, just to make sure I didn’t get contaminated. It’s a well-made film, but I cannot recommend it and I will never watch it again.

8 times justice delayed is still justice, sometimes, out of 10

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“At the time detectives found insufficient evidence for him to be considered a person of interest” – but…he was so creepy - The Stranger