All of Us Strangers
Directed by Andrew Haigh
Running time: 1hr46 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Andrew Scott in All of Us Strangers
If you live in London — or indeed any large, fast-expanding British city — you may have looked at those tall, glossy columns of new-build flats, rapidly mushrooming in the city’s outer, lesser-loved patches, and absently wondered who lives there. Andrew Haigh certainly has. Much of his exquisite new film All of Us Strangers roams the echoing hallways and purgatorial wind tunnels of one such spotless high-rise development, as empty as its mandated promises of affordable housing, smelling the fresh, neutral paintwork and searching for signs of life. Few lights are on in its hard, ice-grey facade: one is in the boxy, chicly but impersonally furnished flat of fortysomething screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott), who seems to have chosen this hollow new home as a veritable barrier from human contact. That’s who lives in these glass towers, the film suggests: people wary of living at all.
Adam is a solitary soul, which isn’t to say he enjoys his own company: he nurtures his own loneliness with a writer’s studied self-observation. He’s gay and out — to himself and presumably to the friends we never see — but comes from a generation where that social difference still presses on his mind, where he’s still used to keeping some part of himself hidden. When Harry (Paul Mescal), a young, attractive fellow rattling around a few floors below, knocks on his door with a sheepish grin, a bottle of whisky and a more-than-neighbourly offer of company, Adam briskly sends him back downstairs: you can’t focus on the solemn business of being alone, after all, with a cute Irishman in your bed.
But something shifts, in his mood or in his mind, and Adam and Harry soon strike up an intimate connection of the type that Haigh, twelve years after breaking through with his gay brief-encounter heartbreaker Weekend, understands with equal parts emotional and erotic intensity. With his life thus hotly ruptured, Adam’s reality tilts further: on an idle nostalgic wander past his childhood home in a garden suburb, he’s startled to find his parents there, alive and well and the same age they were when they died in a car crash in 1987. They’re a little less bewildered, but full of questions for the son they haven’t seen since he was an anxious 11-year-old boy. What’s he doing for a living? What kind of writing? Anything they might read themselves? How’s life in the big city? Why doesn’t he seem happy? Surely he’s met a nice girl by now? No? Oh. Oh. Well, they’re not sure what to make of that.
All of Us Strangers is a special kind of ghost story: one less interested in the supernatural considerations of life after death than in how the uncanny puts the everyday in focus. Adam has never quite come to grips with being orphaned as a child; that has left him in a kind of in-between realm, one foot gingerly in the real world and one nervously outside it, hesitant to embrace any other life that might be lost to him. In an extraordinary performance, Andrew Scott plays him both tenderly and with an acerbic defensiveness, his tense, watchful face occasionally scribbled over with hurt surging to the surface, his gait like a persistent spiritual ache made flesh. He’s wonderfully supported by Mescal, as the life of the party who might need a lifeline of his own, and by Claire Foy and an especially devastating Jamie Bell as loving parents who can’t quite fathom the man they made, gradually realising they weren’t sufficiently there for Adam, even when they were.
I saw All of Us Strangers way back in the summer of last year, and was floored by its elegant emotional maximalism — an iridescent leap into fantasy and melodrama from a filmmaker hitherto versed in fine-grained realism — and, if I’m being honest, by the close-cut acuity of its portrait of unattached queer living in a city and generation moving steadily on from the elastic freedoms of youth. (Why would I, a single, 40-year-old gay writer in London, be hit with a shiver by this? Who can say?) Ordinarily, I would revisit a film before reviewing it a whole two seasons later, but in this case I’m not ready to: I lost my own father in November, and Haigh’s heartsore portrait of grief curdling all those other insecurities strikes me as a little too raw for the moment.
Yet the film, in all its intricately laced beauty and sadness, hasn’t left my mind these last few months. It feels like one to grow with, to revisit in different lights and mindsets, to step back from and later, when the time is right, to hold close once more. And in the meantime, to recall, with some care and concern, when you see one cube of light in a cold, sky-reaching London block.
ALL OF US STRANGERS (2023) Written by Andrew Haigh | Shot by Jamie D. Ramsay | Edited by Jonathan Alberts