The Stranger

Writer/director Atom Egoyan's experimental drama starts from a truly compelling premise: A teenage boy, who has grown up blaming his father for his parents' early death, conflates their fairly mundane death (car crash) with a news story of coercion and terrorism he hears about in French class. “If the bomb had gone off in mid-air, as my father intended," he tells his classmates, "all 400 people aboard would have perished. And I wouldn’t be here to tell you this story.” Trouble is, he doesn't tell them that he's full of shit, and soon the community (global now, thanks to the internet) spins into hysterics. Egoyan includes long webchats—believable but annoying—in which teenagers work through the intricacies of cultural relativism and adults explode in xenophobic grief. Unfortunately, the film's absolute self-seriousness (dark strings, hushed conversations) borders on melodrama; and Egoyan's pedantic monologues (“I think that this idea we get that if you get to know someone—if you humanize them—it stops you from pulling the trigger or setting off the bomb or whatever, well, that’s just a myth we’re taught, something we get from the movies...") recall nothing so much as cringe-worthy late-night dorm room chats. By Lindy West