Sean Harris has always had a captivating, slightly erratic, disturbing screen presence.
He uses a hollow, lifeless expression while swallowing certain sentences in a half-whisper.
The characters he portrays have a ghostly quality. And he makes excellent use of that talent in Thomas M.
Wright’s tense and potent “The Stranger,” which had its world debut at Cannes back in May and was quietly released on Netflix last week with next to no publicity.
In the first few moments of this real Australian story, Harris portrays Henry Teague, who later proves to be the antagonist.
This movie settles right away into a procedural investigation of a terrible criminal.
If you have no prior knowledge of one of the biggest undercover operations in Australia’s history, please leave now and come back later.
Henry is actually the prime suspect in one of Australia’s most infamous missing person cases, and the movie shows him being dragged into a major sting operation to eventually catch him.
It begins with what Henry perceives as a chance encounter with a stranger on a bus who presents him with a chance.
Henry initially appears to be about to become entangled in a criminal underworld that could land him in hot water.