Photo courtesy of Netflix
Transparency is vaunted as a supreme virtue these days but—think about it—do you really want to be transparent? What if all your thoughts could be read and every deed revealed to everyone? What if the Internet, that window to the world, is the unlocked access point for anyone who wants to burgle your life?
Most of us already know that this is already happening and the anxiety over our invasive society is the engine moving the plot of “The Stranger.” In this Netflix Original Series, a young woman in a baseball cap approaches strangers and tells them things about themselves—or damaging things about their loved ones that they never knew. Sometimes she demands money for silence. Always she seems driven by a fanatical ideology of truth-telling, a zeal against hypocrisy.
She occasionally nails a deserving target, like the dad who feeds steroids to his athlete son. Mostly she causes pain (or worse).
Although based on a novel by American crime writer Harlan Coben, “The Stranger” is a British production set in an affluent suburb and a neighborhood being forcibly gentrified. There aren’t more than two or three degrees of separation between characters who are often startled by how connected they really are. As for the plot, suffice to say that revenge porn goes viral among the teenagers; one mom fakes a pregnancy using a kit purchased online; someone’s daughter works her way through college (and into blackmail) through a sex site; tracker apps on phones reveal locations; and CCTV records events on the streets and stores them in the Cloud,
Needless to add, the Internet profiles that the characters have cultivated, their Facebook walls and posted photographs, provide more information about themselves than they realized.
Spread across eight episodes, “The Stranger” is compulsive watching as one secret leads into another. Some of the characters are deranged or have leveraged their morality to the point of being capable of anything. Many are short-sighted and are—as greater catastrophes unfold—incapable of seeing beyond their self-absorption.
Beyond dramatizing the power of the Internet to strip us naked, “The Stranger” asks an eternal and uncomfortable question: Can we ever truly know anyone, even those who are closest to us?
