Broken heart looks to heal in beautiful London-set story
“All of Us Strangers” is a lovely way to begin 2024, not because it’s especially seasonal but because it’s just so beautifully acted and tenderly observant.
In writer-director Andrew Haigh’s drama, we meet Adam, played by Andrew Scott, alone in a newly built London highrise. He’s a writer, accustomed to solitude, and to living a cautious life mostly inside his imagination.
Lately, he has begun a screenplay about his parents, played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, and an early close-up of a document on Adam’s laptop reads “Ext. (Exterior) suburban house 1987.” As we learn soon enough, that year, 1987, changed then-12year-old Adam’s life forever.
In his apartment Adam hears a knock; it’s Harry, another man who lives in the building, drunk and available. They have spied each other from a distance but never spoken. Played by Paul Mescal, Harry makes a pass at Adam (who’s also gay) but Adam declines, politely. In more sober circumstances, some time later after awkward small talk in the elevator, they get together. And across an unfixed, undetermined number of days and nights, their story becomes the love story of “All of Us Strangers.”
As Adam reveals details about his fraught relationship to his parents, who we learn early on died in a car crash, Harry becomes his lover, sounding board and romantic possibility.
Numerous times throughout “All of Us Strangers,” Adam travels by train to revisit the home where he grew up in Dorking, 21 miles south of London. What he finds there defies explanation;
his parents apparently live there still, just as they were in 1987. This is Adam’s research in supernatural form; he’s revisiting not just a place but communing with the memory of his lost parents. Many things between Adam and his parents went unsaid when they were all together. As a child, Adam always knew he was gay and was bullied for being sensitive, different, “creative” — all the euphemisms and condescending code words for queer. Did his parents know what he was going through? Would they have accepted him for who he was, in the years of the AIDS epidemic? What would they think of him now that he’s an adult, coping with so much childhood loss and deeply buried emotions?
There are a couple of different ways to experience “All of Us Strangers.” It can be watched as a fluid sort of reverie on roads and conversations not taken — heartbreaking ones. It can also be watched as an exercise in subtle visual excellence. Haigh is a rare writer-director indeed, equally skillful on the page and behind his camera. As Adam falls into a trance of aching nostalgia for what
he lost, the movie becomes almost liquid in its flow in and out of dreamscapes and reality. (Cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay shot the movie on 35-millimeter film, perfect for the exquisite cross-fades and dissolves Haigh favors.)
Scott conveys a wealth of profoundly affecting sadness and resolve; Mescal matches his work with a vital portrayal full of slightly unruly lost-boy charisma. The scenes with Bell and Foy as Adam’s 1987-era parents are enough to make you weep for all the people in the world who, whether their stories are like Adam’s story or not, wonder and ruminate about all the unspoken somethings from their childhoods.
We carry those somethings with us, however long we live. Haigh has taken familiar feelings and oft-explored ideas in his own spectral direction with “All of Us Strangers.” Sad as it is at its core, it’s an inspiring way to start a new movie year.