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“The Stranger” is a tense if tidy thriller that chronicles a ride-hail driver’s journey to surveillance hell and again. Her survival in opposition to all odds mirrors that of the film itself: The movie’s footage initially premiered in 13 short-form episodes in 2020 on the streaming service Quibi, a number of months earlier than it shut down.
The recut model (on Hulu) bears little hint of its earlier type, though its life span throughout algorithm-driven streaming firms does solid the villain’s tech preoccupations — “whoever figures out the mathematical system figuring out the losers and the winners in life will rule” the world, he declares — in a brand new, meta mild.
Written and directed by Veena Sud (“The Killing”), the movie follows Clare (Maika Monroe), a current transplant to Los Angeles who falls right into a freeway nightmare after her ride-hail passenger, Carl (Dane DeHaan), identifies himself as a serial killer. He claims he’ll homicide her until she tells him story.
If this opening sounds cliché, the movie at the very least appears conscious of the pitfalls. Sud creates parallels between Clare in Hollywood and Dorothy in Oz, assigning Clare a Kansan again story, a yapping terrier and a guileless angle. And DeHaan embodies the tech-savvy Carl as a pasty, smirking male chauvinist who’s sillier than he’s scary.
It follows as one thing of a shock, when, over the course of the second act, the movie builds to a deeply agitated temper. Sud pulls off the tonal shift by protecting Carl largely offscreen; his looming absence, alongside Monroe’s knack for portraying paranoia, simmers with menace.
The StrangerNot Rated. Operating time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Hulu.
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