WHEN ADAM MET HARRY
Andrew Haig’s quietly moving drama, based on a short story by Japanese writer Taichi Yamada, is a strangely compelling examination of loneliness, paths not taken, “what-ifs”, “shouldhaves” and “if-onlys”.
In spite of its Christmas setting and a narrative trick that walks a slippery line between mawkish sentimentality and Dickensian ghost story, Haig succeeds in producing a film with big questions that carry it over the potential pitfalls of its plot twists.
At times it gives off the schmaltzy veneer of supernatural dramas like The Sixth Sense or What Dreams May Come, but All of Us Strangers is its own unique beast – part ghost story, part psychological thriller, part metacontemplation of the process of artistic creation that enables us to process trauma through imagination.
The main draw cards are a quartet of subtly layered performances from Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell and Claire Foy that help to fold its fantastical elements into the territory of realist drama so that the point of the film is not whether or not it’s all a twisted fever dream happening in the mind of the protagonist but what he, and we, learn from the experience by its emotionally exacting conclusion.
This isn’t an M. Night Shyamalan supernatural thriller so it’s no spoiler to lay out some of the film’s plot. It’s in the experience of immersion in the story and not in trying to piece together a puzzle that the satisfaction of the film rests.
Scott plays Adam, a lonely scriptwriter struggling to write — from his apartment in an eerily unoccupied new apartment block tower in present-day London — about his ’80s childhood in a small town. When his creative struggles are interrupted by a knock on the door from the building’s only other occupant
— an attractive fellow loner named Harry (Mescal) who’s drunk, horny and looking for company — Adam uncomfortably rebuffs his advances. He then takes a train back to his hometown where he stares at his childhood home, hangs around aimlessly and, as he’s about to leave, bumps into his long-dead father (Bell) who happily takes him home to see his mother (Foy) so that they can catch up on everything that’s happened to their son since they were killed in a car crash during the Christmas holidays when he was 12.
A series of visits to his ghostly parents follows in which Adam takes advantage of the opportunity he never had to come out to them, confront them about their failings and generally put back together the pieces of a relationship broken by tragedy. Back in London, buoyed by his interactions with his parents, Adam decides to take a leap of faith and let his neighbour into his flat and his heart as the two men begin a romance that offers them both the opportunity for escape from their alienation and loneliness.
Whether or not any, parts, or all of this is the real thing or just some sort of fantasy —a sad, difficult trip down memory lane to goldtinged memories of childhood taken by a middle-aged man struggling to get past the devastating crack that opened up in his world when he was 12, it feels touchingly, achingly real to both Adam and the audience.
By the time Haig delivers his answer to the question, the journey has been worth more than its destination thanks to the dedication of the performances; a dreamy visual style that navigates the tricky balance between Adam’s inner and outer life, and a haunting sense of the fragility and delicacy of human relationships that lingers long after its end.
‘All of Us Strangers’ is on circuit.