All of Us Strangers is Andrew Haigh’s newest film starring the mercurial Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, alongside Claire Foy and Jamie Bell. Until the movie’s acclaimed premiere at the Telluride Film Festival last summer, I hadn’t heard of Andrew Haigh – but be assured that after seeing this one, I plan to sit and watch all his previous movies in the next few weeks.
“This is a story that tries to make amends, say what was never said, to find peace in and with yourself more than with anyone else.”
It’s always trickier to talk about a film you loved. I struggle to find the words to explain why it moves so strongly – saying that I loved it doesn’t even sound right, considering it left me staring into space for the next few hours and was constantly on my mind for the rest of the weekend. Hopefully, you’ll understand once you’ve seen it. For now, I’ll do my best to encourage you to run to the cinema while it is still showing.
Despite being promoted as a rom-com with the help of Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal’s engaging and entertaining press tour, All of Us Strangers is nothing of the sort. Or, more precisely, it is masterful in the way it captures your attention by introducing itself as a love story, before dropping any pretension to comedy and choosing to delve into the trauma and loneliness of its protagonist, Adam (Andrew Scott). It is simpler and, at the same time, stranger than anything you could expect. Deprived of any light-hearted naivety, it suspends your disbelief and makes you consider death as something other than a limit. In other words, it gives hope.
“The manufactured peacefulness of some of those sequences alternates with explosive panic. You’re never fully at rest during the quiet, slow moments because it could crumble at any point.”
In a brand new high-rise apartment block in London, it seems Adam and Harry (Paul Mescal) are the only two tenants. They are both lonely, queer, attractive, and dealing with their own crises – what better start to a love story than this? But the fairy-tale quickly takes a dramatic turn. Adam’s writer’s block prevents him from completing any script, so he resolves to travel back to his childhood home – but whether this is for inspiration or liberation is the question that remains. There, he meets his parents as products of his own imagination.
“I always saw [the movie] as allegory, as fable, as a trip through his subconscious, whatever it might be. But at the same time, I still wanted it to feel grounded in some reality.” – Andrew Haigh in interview with NPR’s Ari Shapiro
After the initial incomprehension, one quickly gathers that Adam is dreaming up a version of his parents and childhood home stuck in the 1980s, conjuring to life memories of his eleven-year-old self that might as well be true. Conversations are engaged between the grown-up Adam and his parents as they were before their death thirty years earlier – talks of gayness, of trauma being addressed and dismissed at the same time as the discussions flow from one subject to the next. In that same NPR interview, Haigh suggests that the movie is all about “trying to excavate that pain in order to sort of find some liberation.” The ending of the movie leaves it up to you to decide whether or not this liberation is achieved.
Adam is striving for an inner peace he never quite accomplished, while his parents try to atone for their mistakes. Apologies are made – Adam imagines reactions both realistic and hopeful, retreating into his younger self to reach for answers. Haigh carefully puts side by side ridicule and tragedy as a grown man in a ten-year-old’s pyjamas climbs into bed with his parents because he can’t sleep. It might be all in his head, but it might be real too – either way, who are you to understand that pain?
“What I wanted the film to be was compassionate to everybody,” Haigh states. All of Us Strangers will speak to every one of us in a different way – whether you grew up gay in the 80s and 90s under the haunting spectre of AIDS, or openly queer in the twenty-first century while still riddled with the fear of encountering this very specific kind of loneliness. Whether you’ve lost a parent, spent your life drifting away from a family that isn’t really one, or just never really been able to talk to them. This is a story that tries to make amends, say what was never said, to find peace in and with yourself more than with anyone else.
I wasn’t born in the eighties. I didn’t listen to the Pet Shop Boys or Bronski Beat growing up, and I didn’t live in the suburbs of London. Yet throughout I felt like I could relate to the world that is set up by Adam’s memories and delusions. The eerie, dream-like lighting that surrounds the parents and saturates the screen brings you in. It is most likely due to the fact that the scenes were shot in Andrew Haigh’s own childhood home: his familiarity with the space perfectly translates to the screen. The manufactured peacefulness of some of those sequences alternates with explosive panic. You’re never fully at rest during the quiet, slow moments because it could crumble at any point.
In parallel with Adam’s enlightening journey through his past life, his relationship with Harry seemingly develops as another ladder to help Adam climb back out of the hole he finds himself in, at a point in his life where all is crisis and breakpoint. Harry appears as a tender light that flickers in and out as he holds the power to become the realisation or downfall of Adam’s desperate attempt at making it to the other side.
Paul Mescal is undeniably suffering from a successful case of type-casting. He stays faithful to his heartbreaking grasp on the lonely, depressed, and vulnerable man. It’s a perfect match to Andrew Scott’s intensity in a performance that anchors him as one of the greats of his generation. Scott takes you through the gut-wrenching hundred and six minutes of runtime with a depth and earnestness that can only draw you in.
All of Us Strangers touches on so many questions – identity, queerness, family, loss, depression, loneliness. But it’s also about the nothing in between all of that. About the love that survives endings, and whatever may happen after.
WORDS: Nina Bernier
