![]() ![]() There is no doubt as to where its allegiances lie.Henri Chang and Jung-chi Chang’s Taiwanese adaptation of Miyuki Miyabe’s crime mystery novel, Mo Ho Han (The Copy Cat), turns out to be a winner in more ways than one.Ĭast – Kang Ren Wu, Tsung-Hua Tou, Cammy Chiang, Chia-Yen Ko, Fandy Fan, Ruby Lin Nor does it identify the victim or their family in any manner. And although the film is based on a real incident, it steers clear of giving any details about it. The Stranger could, of course, be a nod to either Mark or Henry - that is essentially what they are to each other, despite how close they eventually become - but it could also be a reference to that old warning that mothers give to their children, a warning that the child Henry is said to have killed probably ignored. Which brings us to the sneaky depth of the film’s seemingly uninspired title. A lesser movie would’ve done it the other way around. This is perhaps because we meet Mark’s son before we are given more details about the child that Henry supposedly killed. For the investigating officer to have a child of the same age as the one he is fighting to get justice for borders on self-parody, but somehow, the movie manages to make you briefly forget that this is a cliche at all. ![]() He’s clearly out of his depth as a single dad - Mark is short-tempered, and seems generally distant - but he is also visibly concerned about the boy. The character work is subtle, without pushing against the forward momentum of the plot. You can sense the effort that goes into a decade-long manhunt for a child-murderer, and just how many moving parts (and resources) an investigation like this requires. Wright, who also wrote the screenplay, keeps cutting back to other investigators working in the shadows, hoping for Mark to have a breakthrough that would enable them to close in on Henry once and for all.Īrtistic as Wright’s filmmaking is - the experience is similar to watching an Andrew Dominik movie - The Strangers is, at its core, a procedural. ![]() While it is initially suggested that Mark and Henry might eventually develop an actual friendship despite the circumstances, the movie never really takes the story down that road. “I’ve never felt more free,” he says, squinting at the sun, as the man tasked to elicit a confession from him looks on silently. Having been welcomed into the mob with a shrug and a handshake, thanks to Mark’s intervention, Henry has a reason to feel hopeful again. The first time that we see sunlight in the film is well past the 30-minute mark. The Stranger is also a great new entry in a turn-of-the-century wave of hopeless Aussie movies that includes titles such as Sleeping Beauty, Snowtown, Animal Kingdom, and the recent Nitram. And in tone, it’s darker than Cary Joji Fukunaga’s True Detective there’s a lot of philosophical introspection about the nature of evil. In narrative scope, it’s a lot like Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder it goes back and forth in time as the investigators crack open an old case. Directed by Thomas M Wright, The Stranger can hardly be described as a cousin to Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. When you condense the premise of this film down to its bare essence, it certainly sounds a lot schlockier than it actually is. ![]()
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