Gentle, meditative, mystical, immersive, and contemplative are hardly the words that first come to mind when describing a sting operation to trap a child killer. That is precisely what writer/ directer Thomas Wright (Acute Misfortune, Everest) did in The Stranger starring Joel Edgerton (Thirteen Lives, Obi-Wan Kenobi) and Sean Harris (Mission Impossible).

Wright was attracted to the provocative and intensity of the subject matter, but he took his time to decide on his take. “It’s a serious undertaking to take on a film about the death of a child,” he said. “It requires a serious and considered approach.” Wright thought long and hard about making The Stranger because it affected him to the point of a physical reaction. He was hospitalized with pneumonia soon after completing the first draft.

The filmmaker decided that although the film was ostensibly about violence against a child, he refused to portray it on the screen. He felt that he didn’t have any right to represent the actual case on which the story was based or use real names. He created a fictitious child who never shown on screen. “I also had no interest in representing the real person responsible or their motivation to kill a child.” Not all killers have an elaborate psychology to explain their actions. Their darkness is simply part of their DNA.

Wright’s fictionalization process gave him gave him a clear moral compass to the “form of the film.” His north star was to depict the human capacity for violence. “This issue is almost primal and mythic.”

Thomas M. Wright

Wright wrestled with the lofty parameters he set for himself. “The material was very densely layered and required six months of research before I started writing.” He used customary index cards on his wall to lay down the story beats before typing Fade In.

The case to flush out the perpetrator and lead him into a confession involved an undercover detective Mark Frame (Joel Edgerton) befriending killer Henry Teague (Sean Harris) and inviting him into a fictitious gang orchestrated by the police. Thomas Wright spent months becoming comfortable with the legal basis of these operations. “I wrote the first script pass in six days. Then there were a few weeks of editing to complete the draft which was financed.”

Catching a child murderer was only part of what Wright wanted to explore thematically. “This type of material is at the core of why we have society and social constructs to protect us and give form to our formless reality,” he mused. “It’s the type of violence and behavior found in Greek tragedies.”

Many screenwriters typically familiarize themselves with comparable films before carving out a space for theirs. Wright operated on the pretext that The Stranger was the first film of its kind to maintain its independence. As such, he focused on the specificity of the case to write his story.

The Process Of Adaptation

There was a book called The Sting: The Undercover Operation That Caught Daniel Morcombe’s Killer written by crime journalist Kate Kyriacou that outlined the police machinations in exhaustive detail. Wright was very reliant on her knowledge of police operations, but he didn’t want to directly adapt the book. He undertook a similar research process for his earlier film Acute Misfortune. “The actors wore the real people’s clothes.”

The filmmaker isn’t keen on direct adaptation because a film should infuse its own perspective into the source material. “There is a dialogue with the source, but a film shouldn’t repeat the same conclusions.”

The Sting involved a clear process of distillation due to the true-crime elements of the case. “The real family, the victim, the events of that day, the inquest, and the other suspects,” were excluded in The Stranger. Wright’s story is compressed and contained. “Our story takes place in a contained time after the coronial inquest many years after the events took place and concludes with finding the remains of the victim.”

The writer/ director found this approach was necessary to create a distance from the actual events. “I wanted to focus on the people who didn’t know the victim or his family, yet devoted years of their lives to help these Strangers.”

Thomas Wright justified his oblique traversion through the story to created the empathy that he desired. “I was interested as having empathy as the connective tissue in the film by not having the victim there.” He was gently asking the audience, who is the stranger they care most about in his film? Empathy represents the collective societal response. Such devastating events harness our collective shock and grief. Despite the victim being a stranger the audience could ponder that it could have been their child or a child that they knew.

The Stranger relies on subtraction, omission, and expanse to tell its story. As a true cinematic maverick, Wright confessed to having no interest in contemporary storytelling trends. “I’m only interested in shape and form. I’m asking you to breathe with the film as a physical experience.”

The whole story is built around absence and restraint

“The Stranger also works as a kind of dream because none of it is real,” professed Wright. “Teague is entering a dream while Frame is descending into a nightmare.” Wright expanded on the dream-like quality of his film. “We tell stories to give form to chaos.”

The Frame-Teague Dance

The innocuous title of the film takes on an additional meaning. “Frame and Teague are both liars. They are not who they appear to be. The Stranger is a two-faced, two-sided story of primal dualities – light and dark, physical and abstract, past and present, interior of a person and exterior.” At times, Frame and Teague become strangers to themselves. They both travel under assumed names an identities.

The key relationship in The Stranger is that between undercover cop Mark Frame and Henry Teague. It took Edgerton over two years to agree to playing the part, while Sean was onboard for around a year constantly offering his feedback on the screenplay. The shooting script was so tight, containing around two hundred scenes leaving little room for improvisation or confusion.

Their bond touches on themes of friendship, masculinity, and survival. “There is a behavioral imperative for each to mirror the other to maintain their facade.” Teague is principally-driven by his impulsivity and lack of empathy while Frame is considered and empathic.

Mark Frame (Joel Edgerton) & Henry Teague (Sean Harris). Photo courtesy of Netflix

Teague leans into Frame’s character in order to fit into the organization comprising fifty undercover operatives. Frame needs to lean into Teague’s essence to navigate being in close proximity to someone so evil. Frame had to confront the potential emotional, psychological and personal risk to his well-being in Teague’s presence in case he accidentally opened up a Pandora’s Box. “Teague was this shut up box of secrets and lies, who as he begins to open up like a flower, Frame desperately wants to close him again.” Teague eventually gushes out a confession to Frame because he’s probably the only real friend he’s ever had. “Frame is someone who gets him, accepts him, likes him, appreciates him and rewards him.” But he’s not his friend.

Teague also came from a military family with its itinerant lifestyle and relative difficulty in forming enduring relationships. “He probably also saw Frame as a sort of father figure.” This ties in nicely with Frame’s relationship with his own son. Wright cast his own son in the role so he could portray what he cared about the most. Teague slowly eroded this father-son dynamic.

A pivotal scene which captured the essence of Teague’s character was when he confesses to Frame that he used to watch a lot of amputee porn to Frame. This wasn’t sexual, but rather Teague’s increasing closeness and trust in their friendship. David Lynch referred to such scenes as being “the eye of the duck” or the jewel in the duck’s body. “That was the truest moment of writing character. I knew I had both characters in that scene.” It arguably revealed Teague’s deep secret despite Frame’s disgust. On a deeper level, it may represent Teague’s self-consciousness of his perversion, his inability to form meaningful relationships, and a vital missing part being removed from him. He’s incomplete.

Wright deliberately wrote Teague as an under-developed character. There aren’t any massive expositional dumps on his background delivered to the audience – not overtly at least. “There is enormous narrative weight, but you’re not conscious of receiving it.”

The locale of the film is arguably a character unto itself. “The film was set in these desolate badlands making The Stranger a claustrophobic portrait of these two men.”

Mark Wright writes ascetically in a largely empty studio free of distractions. “I have nothing in there except for my materials.” His walls are bare except for this index cards. He rigorously selects the corner stone cards to lay down the essential story beats. Then he arranges additional cards vertically to build out the story. “Blocks of cards become the acts.” Such meticulous preparation creates a “flood which allows the characters’ voices to come out.” It was mainly certain structural and story logic elements which needed refining during the writing process.

He constructed the stories of the detective and undercover operation narratives separately because they were both so substantial. “I realized that I could connect them through a reveal that they weren’t parallel narratives, but rather parallel timelines.”

The Stranger is delivered as gentle simmer throughout with a subtler tension. It never boils. Thomas Wright maintained the tension in his story through pressurization, immersion, and containment. He kept layering the storylines until they eventually converged to an understated confession and subsequent arrest. Wright focused on telling his story from Teague’s point of view so audiences might vicariously understand what it might be like being the subject of an investigation. “Teague’s paranoia and psychological discomfort underscore the constant tension.”

Both Teague’s and Frame’s stakes gently unfold to culminate into a taught story. Frame forever risks blowing his cover. Tension is further maintained via “scenes of stillness when they look each other in the eye.” These occur three times – at Henry’s house before he dances, in the confession, and in the forest at the end before he’s arrested.

Thomas Wright chose not to create a nail-biting drama where audiences wondered if the crime was going to be solved. He didn’t want a twist where they were misdirected and then led to an unexpected reveal when they realized the undercover organization was really a hoax to trap Teague. “The reveals were more subtle and came in waves.” They rippled through the story to make their point rather than culminate into an explosion.

The narrative of The Stranger mainly travels vertically rather than horizontally. The former relates to mining deeper layers of character and the latter refers to events and plot points. “Content is horizontal, but form is vertical,” added Wright. “The vertical is the timeless and more eternal aspects of the story.“