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The Tender, Lingering Phantoms of All of Us Strangers


All of Us Strangers is a lot more haunting a movie than I anticipated. And I don’t just mean in terms of how it features literal ghosts, but in how spectral and loosely attached to a corporeal plane the general atmosphere is, how affecting the pull of the past is on its protagonist, how downright unnerving it can be at times, and how it lingers with you like its own ghost after the credits roll. I thought this was just going to be a sweet gay love story with a thread running through about complicated relationships with parents. Andrew Haigh though, adapting a Japanese novel by Taichi Yamada, made something a lot more entrancingly compelling and meaningful. Something about severe trauma and loneliness, memory and the desire for closure.
It is an exceptionally tender movie, centred on a morose gay television screenwriter Adam, played by Andrew Scott, who has never fully reconciled the tragic death of his parents in a car accident when he was twelve years old. Mining the memories for some unidentified project, he visits their old home in London where he appears to encounter his mum and dad as they were when he last saw them -younger than he is now. These visitations coincide with his embarking on a relationship with a new neighbour Harry (Paul Mescal), with whom he confides the sad details of his past.
Scott and Mescal have sizzling chemistry as their relationship evolves over the course of the movie -beginning when the latter drunkenly propositions him late one night at the door and ultimately developing into a lovable romance, free of any manufactured tension. Their sexual scenes are quite overt, though more warmly explicit are their moments of loving sensuality, where they talk deeply and with vulnerability in close embrace. It’s one of the great examples in recent years of a gay relationship in a studio movie being permitted the same sense of affection as a straight one. The two also just build such an earnest rapport, united both in sensibility (they have a compatible humour) and shared LGBTQ trauma -when talking of families, you don’t need anything more than Harry saying he “doesn’t go home much these days” to understand, even as this comment is later revealed to be more nuanced. It’s also curious how their different generations come out, such as in Adams’ relationship to evolving queer terminology and in what it means to come out.
This is in part a coming out narrative, to parents Adam never had the chance to come out to. And while indeed there is a lot of earnest love and compassion in the romance of Adam and Harry it doesn’t carry quite the power of the scenes between Adam and his parents -whom the movie refrains from identifying as either real ghosts or psychological projections of Adam’s regrets and complicated feelings towards them. Either way, their believability still comes through. Claire Foy’s concerned yet sentimental mother who shares some of her sons dreams for where their family could have gone. Jamie Bell’s guarded, though jovial and caring father who seems to recognize the toxic masculinity that strained his relationship with the young Adam. The scene where Adam comes out to his mother plays with a curious specificity both sad and funny; there’s no rejection or anger -her frame of reference is only in the AIDS crisis, and there’s something amusing in how surprised she is by how much things have changed. But then she presumes he must be lonely because of it and that chasm of understanding opens back up.
It is closed somewhat with his father, in maybe the most moving scene, as he reckons with the home atmosphere he created that made Adam uncomfortable confiding about the bullying he experienced at school. Apparition or projection, it is a deeply felt moment of personal shame that both Scott and Bell play with beautiful poignancy. The four performances in this movie are all great: Bell and Foy tap into the curious nature of their characters as both memory and enigma, emphasizing well these figures who feel really natural -as opposed to the archetypes they could have been. Mescal is great, charming and sexy, yet exhibiting some raw vulnerability near the end. But primarily the movie is a showcase for Scott, who demonstrates a complexity of emotion he has rarely been called upon to give for the screen. The wounds run deep in this character, and Scott has a tightrope to walk in shielding them just enough while never concealing them completely. He also, in the amalgamations of past and present that Adam experiences, has to find a balance of maturity and adolescence; and manages impressively to reflect the intense heartache and regret of a scene that he must perform in a hysterically wretched iteration of child pajamas.
As the movie goes along, Haigh more explicitly blurs the boundaries of reality -Adam going to a club with Harry evolving into a scary night at home with his parents, him taking Harry to see the house when he wakes up in a memory of his last family day out to his favourite restaurant. It is ambiguous where he actually is or what he’s actually doing during these visions -even how much he’s actually experiencing with Harry is thrown into question when a montage suddenly illustrates a lasting relationship between the pair, only to bring them back to the club. It is a beautifully haunting track the movie goes on as Adam becomes lost in his labyrinth of memory and fantasy where he can at long last reckon with that trauma and psychological loneliness that has followed him through his life. At long last he can say goodbye to his parents. The movie speaks enormously well to regret, to missed connections -illustrating the pain of these so potently through that dreamlike flow in which intimacies rub together and understandings are reached with easy compassion; yet finding a measure of bittersweet relief as it suggests those lingering emotional threads and even the fictions grafted to them mean something, coloured though they may be by complicated feelings. The movie ends in a surprising place, with a twist thrown in,  as the corporeal world outside of Adam’s head matters the least -but the imagery and sense of loving relief is spellbinding.
All of Us Strangers, as its title implies, is a movie about people who don’t really know each other. Adam’s parents have to be reintroduced to the man he’s become, and he of course having lost them as a child, doesn’t quite understand who they were. He’s tried to detach himself but keeps being drawn back. It is an often empty movie with so few people, but the closeness of the camera and the spaces disguise this -all the better for the frequent scenes of emotional immediacy. Haigh intends the movie to be felt and related to on a sensory level more than narrative, as can be gleaned by his obfuscation of reality. It works. The movie is a thoroughly engrossing experience that taps into a very specific kind of longing which resonates even if you haven’t experienced it yourself. Moody and melancholic, rooted in queer sadness while being a celebration of queer love;  a warm-hearted ghost story unlike anything else.

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