Gloom, deployed as a storytelling tactic, can exert a strange, unsettling pull when it’s as capably and beautifully conveyed as in Syrian director Ameer Fakher Eldin’s “The Stranger,” recently announced as Palestine’s international Oscar entry. A granular depiction of oppression as a kind of inescapable inheritance handed down from father to son, with mothers and daughters its peripheral, persevering survivors, .
But it is also attuned to the bleak grandeur of the landscapes in this cinematically little-seen region, and its rich, painterly images, appropriately hemmed into boxy Academy ratio, should make “The Stranger” as much a calling card for its cinematographer, Niklas Lindschau, as for Eldin. If not more so: Whenever Eldin’s screenplay gets too ponderous, when the pacing lags or the storytelling withholds too much, there is always a surprising composition to pin our attention. An elderly woman folding linen is briefly a Vermeer. A far-off mountainside in fall,...
But it is also attuned to the bleak grandeur of the landscapes in this cinematically little-seen region, and its rich, painterly images, appropriately hemmed into boxy Academy ratio, should make “The Stranger” as much a calling card for its cinematographer, Niklas Lindschau, as for Eldin. If not more so: Whenever Eldin’s screenplay gets too ponderous, when the pacing lags or the storytelling withholds too much, there is always a surprising composition to pin our attention. An elderly woman folding linen is briefly a Vermeer. A far-off mountainside in fall,...
- 11/30/2021
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety - Film News
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