Cruising the stranger

Stranger succeeds in showing that, for all its banalities, to cruise is to step into the unknown. We enter cruising spaces not knowing who or what is waiting. It could be anyone. It could even be the worst of us: a killer. But the film isn’t a whodunnit. It achieves something infinitely more interesting by complicating the danger. We watch from the edge of our seats not because anyone could be the murderer, but because Franck knows who it is and yet he stays. We watch, horrified and captivated, asking ourselves why; what part of Franck is insisting that he stay?