Loosely based on the novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is a story as intensely beautiful as its opening scene: the audience overlooks the London skyline as the sun rises, slowly revealing Adam (Andrew Scott), aglow in the orange light. He’s alone.
We’re soon met with a montage of bored, restless activity; eating takeaway food, falling asleep in front of the TV, and hunching over a laptop, utterly uninspired. Then appears Harry (Paul Mescal), drunk and uninhibited, asking to come in. They’ve never met — only looked upon each other through windows, perhaps being the sole two living things in their hauntingly empty apartment complex.
Adam, a screenwriter, travels to his hometown in search of ideas for his next project. There, he finds his mum (Claire Foy) and dad (Jamie Bell) waiting, despite them having died in a car crash several decades ago. They pick up where they left off, with Foy and Bell, though frozen in time, playing perfectly adequate parents who acknowledge their flaws without leaning into self-pity. Similarly, Scott strikes a balance between man and man-child without the latter ever feeling silly or insincere.
The film doesn’t disguise Adam’s hallucinatory experiences as truth — rather, it positions him as an unreliable narrator, as what’s real to Adam might not be real in a literal sense. All of Us Strangers reaffirms that what matters isn’t what’s true but what’s gained from our experiences, actual or imagined.
Adam and Harry’s relationship is the film’s secondary plot line, juxtaposing Adam’s life as a gay man in today’s society with his parents’ idea of what that looks like — a lonely, childless, AIDS-ridden existence, according to mum’s old-school ideologies. One might argue that, on its surface, All of Us Strangers claims present-day life is great for gay people. Not only does the film fail to say this, but it actually demonstrates the reverse; Harry, who’s impliedly much younger than Adam, has always felt like a “stranger” in his family, and being gay just “put a name on it.” Despite the legalisation of gay marriage (in some places) and the destigmatisation of sexually-transmitted infections like HIV, homophobia unfortunately remains in place.
Being more than a singular exploration of queerness, All of Us Strangers plays on a shared fantasy: having real, reciprocal conversations with those who aren’t there, and finding closure where it should be inaccessible. The experiences Adam has with his imagined parents aren’t a sign of his questionable mental health — rather, they’re therapeutic, allowing him to process his grief by facing it head-on. Writer-director Haigh manoeuvres these complex emotions with grace, side-stepping clichés and cheap dialogue altogether.
The film culminates in its final act, when Adam’s parents are forced to make a difficult decision. Adam claims their time together hasn’t been long enough before his mum candidly replies, “It never could be.” This simple phrase captures the universal tragedy of loss — we could have infinite time, and we’d still long for more.
A mixture of suburban nostalgia and London nightlife, All of Us Strangers is gorgeously shot, with a spot-on soundtrack that uses music to both evoke memory and implant meaning. Both the film’s gut-wrenching final minutes and the numerous needle-drops that precede them present one message neatly: everything should be done in the name of love.
Though Mescal does a fine job, it’s Bell, Foy, and Scott, in his first leading film role, who ultimately steal the show. It’s also a magnificent turn from Haigh, who delivers what may well be the best, most devastating film of the year. Several repeat viewings — and crying sessions — are inevitable.
