Throughout his career, writer and director Andrew Haigh has excelled in demonstrating the richness of relationships on screen, from fleeting passion in Weekend to an enduring companionship in 45 Years. His latest effort is romance drama All of Us Strangers, based on the 1987 novel by Taichi Yamada. The plot follows screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) who lives a lonely existence in a desolate London tower block. After a fire drill in his building, he has a brief encounter with neighbour Harry (Paul Mescal) who makes a drunken pass at him. Nights later, whilst looking for inspiration for his next script, he visits his suburban childhood home only to find that his mother (Claire Foy) and father (Jamie Bell) are still there, just as he remembers them, despite having been killed in a car accident around thirty years earlier.
With an unclear sense of setting, there’s an air of mystery around the narrative from the outset. Faces and places glisten under the film’s moonlit lens, giving the reflective aesthetic of a mild summer’s evening where the nights would go on forever and anything seemed possible. This specific visual style is enhanced by the music choices, the queer pop sounds of the 1980s seeping into the strange contemporary landscape. As a forty-something Adam struggles to reconcile his uncertain present with a difficult past, we watch on as he comes out to his parents, both loving and supportive but ghosts of a different time. Their frank conversations are challenging but healing, opening our protagonist up to embark tentatively into a relationship with Harry. We become immersed in the mystical ifs, buts and maybes in the fragile mind of our unreliable narrator, and as Haigh’s compelling script explores haunting hypotheticals, he crafts heartrending emotional resonance.
Initially Adam appears relatively comfortable in his sexuality and in an early meeting with his mother, he proudly deflects shame when she tells him, “they say it’s a very lonely kind of life”. But he is lonely, bruised by the trauma of his youth, and when he breaks it feels like the whole world comes crashing down with him. It’s a remarkable performance from Andrew Scott, layers of depth revealing themselves in profound scenes with the equally excellent Foy and Bell. Mescal is doing something quite different as Harry; cocksure and full of charm, he represents the liberated homosexual Adam wishes he could’ve been twenty years earlier until a cruel shift in perspective sheds new light on the piece.
A fantastical meditation on the ripple effects of grief and a longing for love, All of Us Strangers is a stunning adaptation where glimpses of hope shine bright before drowning in crushing waves of melancholy. Andrew Haigh’s beautifully sad storytelling is illustrated by a heartstring quartet of nuanced performances that will devastate before the credits roll.
Cinema Perspective 