Review: All of Us Strangers (2023)
When will Paul Mescal star in a movie that doesn't make me sob?
All of Us Strangers
Dir. Andrew Haigh
1h 45m
Andrew Haigh’s latest film All of Us Strangers is a high-wire act with a premise that sounds challenging, if not impossible, to execute with any modicum of taste. Andrew Scott is Adam, a screenwriter living in a mostly vacant London apartment who begins a relationship with Paul Mescal’s Harry, the high-rise’s sole other inhabitant. As his relationship with Harry progresses, Adam repeatedly visits his childhood home, where he finds his parents, played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, somehow alive and unaged from when they died thirty years earlier in a Christmas car crash. Adam, now older than his parents ever were, has decades of lost time to fill in, as he and his parents reckon with the devastating weight of loss and loneliness.
The process of writing and filming interactions between a boy, now in his mid-forties, and the frozen-in-time parents he lost thirty years earlier, sounds like a story that should not work, and, indeed, this section of the film is not without its shortcomings. Haigh’s script tends to have characters, particularly Foy as Adam’s unnamed mother, explicitly state the film’s themes after they are already apparent to the audience, and there are moments where the strangeness of the film’s conceit strains its effectiveness. The general success of Haigh’s script, however, rests on its performances, which are uniformly wonderful. In particular, the film rests largely upon Andrew Scott’s shoulders, and Scott proves more than capable. The film asks a lot of him as an actor – similar to Charles Melton’s equally exceptional performance this year in Todd Haynes’ May December, Scott must convey both the lonely child he once was, and the broken adult he has grown into. The result is both profoundly moving and rather awe-inspiring on a technical level. Bell and Foy, too, skillfully convey both their wonder and joy at being able to see their son again, and their profound sadness at having missed three decades of his life.
Many of Adam’s conversations with his parents focus on his gayness – he was not out when his parents died, and his parents’ understanding of homosexuality has not evolved past the 1980s. However, the film foregrounds above all else Adam’s parents’ love and care for their son – their reactions to his coming out are rooted in their fear of him experiencing homophobia, and their own regrets at not having supported him as fully as they could have throughout his childhood. While it’s easy to understand how the story may come across as treacly, this is eased somewhat by Haigh’s refusal to explicitly define the nature of Adam’s interactions with his parents – such ambiguity leaves space for the audience to interpret the story as containing a supernatural element, or as merely representing Adam’s internal journey. Ultimately, the film takes a simple, universal question – what would we do if we had more time with the people we’ve loved and lost? – and expands it into a tender, heartfelt narrative of grief and growth.
The film engages with loneliness – specifically gay male loneliness – perhaps even more so than grief. Adam and Harry are both unequivocally lonely – in their first interaction, Harry confesses to having purchased a white noise machine to distract from the empty silence of their near-unoccupied building. Even when they go to a club together, Adam is trapped inside his mind, unable to fully experience reality due to his deep loneliness. Despite the film’s London setting, the cinematography and production design contribute to the story’s thematic exploration of isolation and the inability to connect, conveying the city almost as a ghost town and minimizing Adam and Harry’s interactions with other characters.
The film attributes both men’s loneliness to numerous factors – friends moving out of the city with their families, the loss of Adam’s parents and Harry’s distant relationship to his family, and the isolation of being gay in a society that still stigmatizes queerness even in unspoken ways. The film is careful not to pin its characters’ loneliness entirely on their sexualities – one of its most wrenching moments is when Adam, knowing that it would be dishonest to tell his mother that he is not lonely, instead tells her, “if I am lonely, it’s not because I’m gay.” However, Haigh also does not shy away from the fact that, even in our more progressive society, gayness can still be an alienating experience, particularly in childhood. Film as a medium inherently focuses on interactions between people, and as a result tends not to engage with the gnawing, deep-rooted pain of true loneliness. In All of Us Strangers, Haigh manages to offer a resonant exploration of loneliness, even in a film built entirely on interactions and conversations between its central characters. While Paul Mescal’s Harry initially feels over-idealized as a romantic figure, the film ultimately suggests that imagining the possibility of such a person in one’s life, alongside the act of fully acknowledging and experiencing one’s own grief and loneliness, can allow us eventually to grow and to open ourselves up to connection and community, where we can find true meaning in our lives.
In conveying this message, however, Haigh makes an unfortunately drastic decision in concluding the film – one that feels as inevitable as it does shocking. It speaks to the power of the film’s first 90 minutes that its final 15 do not completely overshadow what comes before, but they nevertheless cast a pall upon an already-devastating film. Perhaps, then, just as Adam must envision a new life for himself before he can actually experience it, the audience is left to imagine a truly satisfying version of the film for themselves.
Rating: 4 / 5
All of Us Strangers is currently playing at Fifth Avenue Cinemas and International Village Cinemas in Vancouver.
If you’ve seen All of Us Strangers, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments! Thanks for reading!