Coming on the heels of Baz Luhrman’s decision to re-edit “Australia” into a mini-series for Hulu, taking an already long film and stretching it well beyond its breaking point in “Faraway Downs,” Veena Sud has chosen to do the opposite for the streaming service. Taking her forgotten Quibi show “The Stranger” — a short-form web series about a rideshare driver (Maika Monroe) who picks up a deranged stalker (Dane DeHaan), leading to the worst night of life — and reformatting it as a lean 90-minute film, Sud recontextualizes Quibi’s ten-minute episodes into a highly episodic, and occasionally bumpy, thriller. 
READ MORE: ‘The Stranger’ Trailer: A Rideshare Trip Goes Terrifyingly Awry In Maika Monroe’s Hulu Horror Movie
Now missing the novelty of the short-form approach that she deployed — where every episode covered an hour of time in the story, leading to a 12-hour window into these characters’ lives — “The Stranger” zips along its improbable story, never slowing down enough for the viewer to question the improbability of everything going on. It also helps that she has Monroe and Dehaan, both of whom are game to play up exaggerated versions of the screen personas they’d perfected at that time (the series was initially released in 2020). Monroe is doing a variation of the type of scream queen performance she perfected in “The Guest” and “It Follows,” while DeHaan is seemingly following his “Chronicle” playbook, playing a creepy incel just as well as anyone. 
Yet, in its original form, the episodes relied on a series of escalating cliffhangers, something that is frustratingly still present in the film. It’s a disorienting editing choice that still shows the seams of the story’s earlier incarnation. Starting out after Monroe’s Clare has recently moved to L.A., hoping to escape her previous life in Kansas, which included a sexual assault allegation against a high school teacher. She’s a wannabe screenwriter working for a rideshare to make ends meet. When she picks up Dehaan’s Carl, they flirt for a bit before, very quickly, Carl lets on that he knows Clare’s history and is intent on killing her. 
The reasons for this are comically held until near the film’s end — something to do with algorithms and predicting people’s behavior. It’s all absurd and, really, the barest of pretense to hang a number of interesting set pieces (the core of the Quibi series) together with the loosest of threads. In short, this ride begins with a night-long chase through L.A., as Clare attempts to flee, and Carl shows up just at the right time to chase her. The finale, which plays out in a police station and the L.A. river, is borderline incoherent, and the things that this story does to Avan Jorgia’s nice-guy gas station attendant, J.J., are almost unforgivable.   
Yet it’s all entertaining in its absurdity. Sud’s career so far has suggested a very serious interest in the intersection between class, race, and policing. It’s the reason why “The Killing” felt so new when it premiered and why her short-lived “Seven Seconds” had a sense of urgency rarely felt in a police procedural. Even her woefully miscalculated film “The Act” was very, very, seriously interested in the ways that minorities are scapegoated by institutional forces. 
“The Stranger” is not that. It’s jagged, absurd, and a hoot of implausible scenarios stacked on top of each other for most of the runtime. When the film does slow down to make some kind of statement about the age of performative transparency on social media, the narrative oxygen is sucked out of the film fast. All the better that these scenes are few and far between. Instead, Sud has Carl essentially act as the Terminator, seemingly everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Is “The Stranger” good? Not exactly. But it’s also not bad either. It’s short, punchy, and has enough narrative momentum to make for an entertaining Friday night diversion. [B-]