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There’s no shortage of true crime media out there right now. Just open up any of the streaming services and you’re bound to see fresh new narrative or documentary projects chronicling the history of some of the most repulsive killers in history. Not all of them have been bad, but after a while, they can blend together and struggle to offer anything new or insightful to prospective viewers. The ubiquity of these titles means it may be initially easy to dismiss the Australian serial killer feature, The Stranger, as just another Netflix title exploiting real-world tragedies to grab people’s attention. But look closer at this motion picture and one finds several critical elements that immediately set this feature apart from the vast majority of true-crime cinema.
What Is ‘The Stranger’ About?
Written and directed by Thomas M. Wright, The Stranger begins by following Henry Teague (Sean Harris) on a bus as he seeks out employment. He eventually finds some work after meeting Mark Frame (Joel Edgerton), who introduces Teague to a crime syndicate that can help give him cash. It turns out, though, that Frame is an undercover police officer who has been tasked with investigating Teague, the primary suspect in the murder of a child years earlier. Frame has to get closer and closer to this man, draw in his trust and find out whatever information he can about this man’s involvement in an unspeakable act of violence.
Many of the most unique elements in The Stranger come from Thomas M. Wright’s restrained filmmaking. This director is not here to spoon-feed audiences information nor is he here to reduce a story rooted in reality (albeit one largely fictionalized, including in the name of the killer, as stated by the filmmakers) to being a cheap in-your-face melodrama. Instead, there’s an eerie quiet to The Stranger, as evidenced in its earliest scenes which plop the audience into the world of Teague with no prior set-up. This kickoff establishes that what we’re watching is a slow-burn thriller, not something that’ll constantly drop recognizable elements or details you’ve heard about on true-crime podcasts.
A Departure From True-Crime Norms
The clinical and cold filmmaking style of these early scenes establishes another key aspect of The Stranger that separates it from many other true-crime projects: a disinterest in delving into the accused killer’s psychology or headspace. There are no flashbacks here to illustrate why he could’ve become a murderer, with the only reference to his past being an offhand mention of a normal upbringing. We don’t get lengthy sequences of him committing kills from his point-of-view or stretches of the story dedicated to exploring what it’s like living in his head on a day-to-day basis. It’s a welcome departure from modern pop culture norms, which often show an eerie level of interest in delving into the psychology of these brutal minds.
‘The Stranger’ Keeps the Audience at Arm’s Length
Plus, this approach works for the story of The Stranger. Teague keeps himself at a distance from everyone he comes into contact with, so The Stranger also opts to keep him at arm’s length from the audience. Even better, this means that all the violence in The Stranger is kept off-screen, we never see a drop of blood or even so much as an arm getting broken. Many true-crime projects embrace the presence of a serial murderer as an excuse to indulge in prolonged sequences of extreme violence. In the process, whether intentional or not, they can reduce real-life murder victims to just being gruesome eye candy for bored Netflix viewers.
Extending The Stranger’s sense of restraint to its depiction of violence ensures this production can avoid that problem with other true-crime projects while also putting viewers closer into the mindset of the man calling himself Mark Frame. This fellow is always on edge knowing he’s interacting with a man who committed violence, but also recognizing that he’s never seen him commit acts of brutality. The suggestion that Teague is capable of something horrible understandably torments Frame’s mind, particularly in a dream sequence where he imagines Teague looming over his adolescent son’s bed. Even in this dream, Frame isn’t imagining Teague chopping his son to bits with a butcher knife. However, the suggestion of Teague’s capacity for violence is enough to make both Frame and the viewer unspeakably nervous.
In another welcome departure from the true-crime movie/TV show norms, The Stranger also opts not to mention the name of the murdered child that spurs the entire plot into action. Now, much like the victims of Jeffrey Dahmer have expressed immense disapproval of Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer series, the parents of the child slain by the man who inspired the fictional character of Teague, have said they aren’t pleased with the existence of The Stranger, as reported by News.com.au. That’s an incredibly valid opinion and it must be unspeakably hard to see any kind of art inspired by the murder of your child.
A Movie About A Real-Life Killer That Isn’t About A Real-Life Killer
However, if you’re going to make a piece of pop culture surrounding this kind of horrible real-world event, The Stranger at least seems to provide a solid blueprint for this type of art. For one thing, the murdered child’s name is never used in the film while fictional names have been used for everyone including the murderer. This sadistic killer doesn’t get to have his name attached to a major motion picture and ensure he gets even more famous. Instead, this real-world event has inspired a fictional story, one that takes many cues from reality (a sting operation involving undercover cops did capture the real-like killer) but also provides some distance between it and the truth. This ensures that The Stranger can confront parts of our horrible reality without reducing actual suffering to a spectacle.
The most important of the ways The Stranger deviates from true-crime pop culture norms is in the depiction of Teague himself. Since the production is creating a fictional stand-in for a real-life person, Teague is not constrained by having to live up to viewer expectations for how a certain killer has to behave or dress. Instead, Wright’s script makes him just this hollow shell of a man brought to haunting life by Sean Harris. There is no disarming charisma here, just those eyes that seem like they’re always staring off into another dimension. There are no stylized quirks or eccentric tics given to Teague, he’s just this disturbingly quiet and detached individual.
This means that Teague isn’t the kind of person people dress up as for Halloween or comic conventions – and that’s a good thing. He’s a vacant space of a man, not a bunch of quotable lines strung together into one human being or a tragic backstory dovetailing into murder. He’s also emblematic of The Stranger’s unique approach to true crime storytelling, which is oriented around utilizing fictional characters navigating a real scenario to capture truly authentic and gripping emotions. That may not be the kind of thing that people expect when they watch a modern true-crime movie or TV show, but The Stranger makes a solid case for this approach being more regularly utilized.
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