“The Stranger”: Somewhere over the freeway
“The Stranger” is a tense if tidy thriller that chronicles a ride- hail driver’s journey to surveillance hell and back. Her survival against all odds mirrors that of the movie itself: The film’s footage originally premiered in 13 short-form episodes in 2020 on the streaming service Quibi, several months before it shut down.
The recut version ( on Hulu) bears little t race of its earlier form, although its life span across algorithm driven streaming companies does cast the villain’s tech p reoccupations — “whoever figures out the mathematical formula determining the losers a nd the winners in life will rule” the world, he declares — in a new, meta light.
Written and directed by Veena Sud (“The Killing”), the film follows Clare ( Maika Monroe), a recent transplant to Los Angeles who falls into a freeway nightmare after her ride hail passenger, Carl ( Dane Dehaan), identifies himself as a serial killer. He claims he will murder her unless she tells him a good story.
If this opening sounds cliche, the film at least seems aware of the pit falls. Sud creates parallels between Clare in Hollywood and Dorothy in Oz, assigning Clare a Kansan back story, a yapping terrier and a guileless attitude. And Dehaan em bodies the tech-savvy Carl asa pasty, smirking male chauvinist who is sillier than he is scary.
It follows as something of a surprise, when, over the course of the second act, the film builds to a deeply agitated mood. Sud pulls off the tonal shift by keeping Carl largely off- screen; his looming absence, alongside Monroe’s knack for portraying paranoia, simmers with menace.