The nihilist in an existentialist world of Albert Camus’ novel “The Stranger” comes to sublime, understated life in the latest film of François Ozon.

The director of “Potiche,” “Eight Women,” “Everything Went Fine” and “When Fall is Coming” turns out to be the perfect choice to grapple with a novel that only Luchino Visconti dared film before him, and he did it in the much more daring and cerebral cinematic era, the 1960s.

Ozon grapples with the story’s novelistic longueurs, its meditative pondering of life, guilt and moral responsibility or irresponsibility in a mesmerising period piece that underscores the timelessness of Life’s Big Questions.

Benjamin Voisin of the French kidnapping comedy “Freestyle” becomes the beautiful blank slate that is Camus’ Meursault. He is a young Frenchman in colonial Algiers so passive that he barely engages with his world, barely notices the unrest among the colonized Arabs, barely acknowledges the love of the vivacious Marie (Rebecca Marder) and can’t be bothered to mourn when his mother dies in the Catholic nursing home where he left her.

It’s no wonder we meet him in prison. The huge cell is filled with natives, so the thin, fair-skinned Frenchman stands out. What did you do, his Islamic cellmates want to know?

“I killed an Arab.”

If Meursault was the least bit wary, guarded or unsure of his life’s meaninglessness, he would have kept that to himself.

Flashbacks tell us how that killing happened, and much that led up to it. He’s an unambitious office worker in a French trading company who only needs “two days” to see to his mother’s affairs. All he has to do ride a bus to the nursing home in the Algerian countryside, meet with the director and the man who built her cedar coffin, and wait for the funeral service.

He sheds no tears. When his mother’s nursing home fiancé trips and falls because of how shattered he is by her deauth, Meursault offers no assistance. When the priest offers a benediction, Meursault is the last to stand — reluctantly.

Everybody there notices this callous emotional detachment. Meursault does not care.

His return to Algiers has him take the afternoon to go swimming in “the baths” off a stone pier. He expresses no delight that the lovely Marie is there and that they swim together. It’s only when he suggests they go to a movie that she realizes his mother just died.

Meursault is a man of few words (in French with English subtitles). “I don’t know.” “You never know.” “There’s no point.” He must have been a fun interrogation for the gendarmes.

Meursault doesn’t intervene in his elderly neighbor’s frequent beatings of his aged dog, is impassive when his pimp neighbor (Pierre Lottin) talks about beating a young woman and isn’t the one to call the cops when Raymond does it again. He is perfectly passive when Marie starts talking about marriage and expresses no interest when the boss suggests a promotion.

“I don’t believe a ‘life change’ is possible,” he shrugs. “One life is as good as another.”

But the crime he’s accused of can’t be passively dismissed, rationalized or even admitted to. “There’s no point” has become his mantra and his dogma. Let’s see how that holds up in court.

Voisin is the very embodiment of the “taciturn” and “reserved” anti hero. He’s so unemotional and emotionally unavailable that we question Marie’s devotion to him. Looks aren’t everything, dear.

Voisin’s placid performance captures something as modern now as it was when the novel was published in 1942. The world’s a mess, awful people are everywhere, guilt and culpability seem inescapeable.

Some will say “It’s better to light a single candle than sit and curse the darkness.” Others won’t even bother with the cursing. “What difference can I make?” Religion, morality, national identity, career, thinking about “the future” with someone, choosing life or questioning “life must go on,” everything is on the table for Meursault.

“No man is an island” is a thesis Camus and Meursault figure is worth putting to the test.

It’s a near miracle that anyone could get a movie out of this. But Ozon, like Visconti before him, has. It’s not for the sentimental, the conventional or the faithful. But “The Stranger,” in book or its latest cinematic form, is for the intellectually curious and questioning. Just don’t go expecting it to provide many answers.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity, smoking

Cast: Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin, Denis Lavant,
Abderrahmane Dehkani and Hajar Bouzaouit

Credits: Directed by François Ozon, scripted by François Ozon and Philippe Piazzo, based on the novel by Albert Camus. A Music Box release.

Running time: 2:02