All of Us Strangers (2024)

Andrew Haigh's gorgeous new film is a tantalising yet traumatic delve into loneliness, loss and rejection that finds brief solace in its two main protagonists, Andrew Scott's Adam and Paul Mescal's Harry. Adam is a screenwriter struggling with a script, attempting to coin it during lonely and unproductive days in his apartment, part of a high-rise tower block in London in which he and Harry appear to be the only residents. The two of them meet one night when Harry knocks on Adam's door, drunk, and despite Harry's best efforts it's clear Adam isn't quite ready for any kind of human contact, be it verbal or physical for reasons that soon become clear. Things change when Adam decides to travel the short distance by train to visit his parent's old house. Upon arrival it seems his parents are not only still living there, they haven't aged since Adam last saw them many years ago, and at the end of the sequence when his Mum (an excellent Claire Foy) insists that he return to visit them again soon Adam looks as if he's found some sort of happiness in his otherwise lonely existence. Of course this isn't some newfound clarity for Adam; we learn his parents died in a car crash when he was young, years before he came out, so far from the closure this might initially seem, when Adam keeps returning to visit his parents we know that he's attempting to find something he never had before. Meeting his parents gives Adam a sense of purpose of sorts, or at the very least a distraction from the cooped up existence he currently lives and this positivity leads to a touching relationship with Harry, which begins which a beautifully shot sex scene when Adam returns from his parents for the first time; cinematographer Jamie Ramsey uses affecting camera angles that brings out the longing in both Adam and Harry's faces as we fully understand how long both of them have been single and yearning for a scrap of tenderness. As this relationship blossoms, as does Adam's with his parents. In a particularly excellent scene Adam comes out to his Mum in which Claire Foy brilliantly portrays the fear, ignorance and lack of understanding of the time for 'homosexuals' as she calls them. After Adam has told his Mum he's gay, she is immediately on edge, a walking product of the manipulation by certain aspects of society and the media at a time when homophobia and prejudice was rife, amongst the Aids crisis. Adam is from a future society, as he tells his Mum where being gay (he mentions to Harry early on he has reservations about the word "queer" for its previous iteration as an insult) isn't a lonely existence anymore; but there's a deep rooted despair on his face as he does so, knowing deep down that despite the fact that it might not be to do with the fact that he's gay, he still suffers from isolation. There's a similar conversation with his Dad later on (an equally fantastic Jamie Bell) who admits to his son that he never used to inquire as to why his son used to cry in his room after school, because he knew that he himself would probably have been one of the bully's subjecting his son to a torrid time at school had he been there. It's easy to imagine this, especially as the conversation is taking place between two individuals who are actually of similar age, and Haigh's insertion of this exchange reminds us that this is all in Adam's mind, however real it might seem or need to be for him. Haigh has dealt with tragic loss before in 45 Years (2015), an exploration of a marriage that's been strong for the titular time period which suddenly begins to disintegrate as something from the past emerges to haunt the couple. All of Us Strangers takes this through-line and flips it on its head somewhat, at the outset propounding the idea that Adam needs closure with his deceased parents before gradually descending into a desperation to hold onto an existence that is simply an unreality. Or is it? One of the strengths of Haigh's film is that it's very much open to interpretation, and at the film's conclusion there's several ways to explicate what you've just been through, plenty of which I've since dissected with many differing to my own personal opinion. All of Us Strangers is adapted from a 1987 Japanese novel by Taichi Yamada which has already been portrayed on screen in Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1988 film The Discarnate, and having neither read the novel nor seen the Japanese adaptation, it's impossible to categorically reflect on how Haigh's film converts on screen in terms of its source. However, with the help of two wonderful performances by Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, Haigh has produced a minimalist masterclass in unconventional storytelling, a piece that's also kept constantly on edge by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch's wonderful score. The only thing that slightly spoiled the experience was an unruly cinema crowd. In a gloriously small screen at a local cinema with only around twenty-five seats, perched in my favoured front row central throne, I was assaulted by two women on my left whispering the whole way through whilst scraping their straws up and down through holes of their Tango Ice Blasts, and two women on my right who checked their phones repeatedly. It's a credit to Haigh's film that I was so engrossed in it that the attempts by these reprobates to derail my enjoyment fell well short of the qualifying levels for me to take matters into my own hands. 8.2/10