All of Us Strangers freezes the portrait of one’s parents in a specific time period. The background is steeped in tragedy.
On the surface, Adam’s (Andrew Scott) life may look perfectly fine. He lives in a London high-rise, with an amazing view, and makes a living as a script writer for film and television, giving him a lot of freedom in how he plans his days. But we soon learn that he’s lonely. One evening, one of his neighbors, Harry (Paul Mescal), knocks on his door. Standing there, drunk, with a bottle of booze in his hands, Harry asks Adam if he wants company. Perhaps not the most charming of booty calls, so Adam politely declines.
Later, he goes back to the house where he was raised and is received by a young couple (Jamie Bell, Claire Foy). They’re happy to see him and start asking him about what his life looks like now. We realize that they are his parents, or rather a vision of them, because they’re stuck in 1987, the way they looked when Adam was 12 years old and lost them in a car accident.
Breaking out of his loneliness
As Adam continues to visit them, he gets a chance to do all that which was taken from him when they died. At the same time, he also takes up Harry on his proposal and they start going out together. Adam begins to break out of his loneliness. But it isn’t as simple as that. Taichi Yamada’s novel is a ghost story, but when Andrew Haigh read it he saw an opportunity to use ”Strangers” as a path into his own past, a way to examine his relationship with his parents and what it was like to be a gay boy in the 1980s.
Above all this is a universally appealing film about loneliness, mental issues and one’s relationship to mom and dad
Obviously, it is also a deeply personal portrait of a gay man and the loneliness that often comes with that, as studies have shown. Haigh has become one of the finest chroniclers of rainbow lives, with lauded films and TV series like Weekend (2011) and Looking (2014-2016), but at the same time one of his very best movies, 45 Years (2015), was the story of an older, straight couple. The gay theme enriches All of Us Strangers immensely, but above all this is a universally appealing film about loneliness, mental issues and one’s relationship to mom and dad; in his works, Haigh knows how to capture touching intimacy between characters.
This is a devastating, sad film that left me deeply shaken. Perhaps the best way to approach it is to bring your best friend, make sure you have the whole evening to yourselves, and then share a bottle of wine and a long talk after the movie.
The cast is brilliant, including Mescal as Harry with ”the sad eyes”, and Scott as the writer whose childhood trauma holds him hostage. You’ll just want to hug him.
All of Us Strangers 2023-U.K. 106 min. Color. Widescreen. Written and directed by Andrew Haigh. Novel: Taichi Yamada (”Strangers”). Cinematography: Jamie Ramsay. Cast: Andrew Scott (Adam), Paul Mescal (Harry), Jamie Bell (Adam’s father), Claire Foy (Adam’s mother).
Trivia: The novel was also filmed in Japan as The Discarnates (1988).
Last word: “I was about nine, and the kids around me knew something was different about me before I really did. So you’re like, ‘I don’t understand why you’re calling me these names.’ But they could feel it somehow. When my mum saw the film, she was like, ‘Is this what happened to you?’ And I was like, ‘Yes.’ If you’re a queer kid, you don’t want to tell your parents you’re being bullied, because they’re going to think you’re different, and that’s the last thing you want. It’s the hardest thing, sometimes, about being queer within a family – you’re not like your parents and you have a secret.” (Haigh, The Guardian)
