The love which outlives death
All Of Us Strangers is a mysterious, absorbing, slightly surreal film about love, in all its complexity, beauty and sadness.
All Of Us Strangers (MA 15+)
In Cinemas
★★★★
Imagine this: your parents die in a car crash when you are 12 but somehow, about three decades later, you can go to their house, the one you grew up in, and hang out with them.
And further imagine this: Mum and Dad are as old as they were when their car skidded on Christmas ice, making you of similar age, and they know they died when you were 12.
“Was it quick?” the mother asks the adult son she has met for the first time.
This metaphysical time shift lies at the unsettled heart of All Of Us Strangers, written and directed by English film-maker Andrew Haigh and starring Irish actor Andrew Scott.
This film is told in two stories that sometimes overlap. One is a tentative gay romance. In the present, a screenwriter named Adam (Scott) starts a relationship with a neighbour named Harry (Irish actor Paul Mescal).
They seem to be the only residents in a London high-rise tower that reminds me of the one in High-Rise, the 2015 film adaptation of JG Ballard’s dystopian novel.
Their first kiss is acted with the understated brilliance that marks all the performances in this film. It’s an awkward encounter, especially for Adam. Later, when his mother asks him if he is lonely, he says that if he is, it’s not because he’s gay, yet there’s uncertainty on his face.
The main story is Adam making return visits to see his mum (Claire Foy) and dad (Jamie Bell), who only remember him as a boy and need to learn about him as a man.
The pivotal revelation is that he is gay. His mother is taken aback – “No parents wants to think that about their child” – and asks him about AIDs. She and her husband died in the 1980s.
She tells her son that she knows, “I was hardly mother of the year, but I think I would have gotten better at it in time”. It’s a lament as she knows that potential “in time” was cut short. His father admits he heard him crying in his bedroom at night, because he was being bullied at school, called a “girl”, but did not come into comfort him.
Both his parents are sorry they were not there for him.
He tells them it was “so long ago’’ and he has “good memories too”.
These sad, beautiful moments between parents and son are reminders that sometimes time matters and sometimes it doesn’t. Some pain lasts forever. Sometimes the time you expect to have doesn’t happen.
All four actors are tremendous. Foy brings a dry humour to the tracksuit-wearing mother who is still living in the 1980s. “You don’t look gay,’’ she tells her son. When he tells her that men can marry men and women can marry women, she asks, “Why?”
Scott is perhaps best known as the hot priest in season two of the television series Fleabag (2016), though this viewer thinks of him as the best Moriarty ever in another TV series, Sherlock (2010-17), starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes.
He brings a coolness, a restraint, to his roles that lends his characters an element of mystery. Yet there are times when that cracks, as in one of the best scenes in this film when Adam, unable to sleep, asks his parents if he can climb into bed with them, as he did as a boy.
Once he’s snuggled between them, his father asks him if he’s OK. His direct answer sums up the emotional weight of this film and the scene itself is a credit to the actors. What we see – a grown man in bed with his same-aged parents – does not look comic or ridiculous.
Haigh is a film-maker who cares about the written word. His moving 2015 film 45 Years, starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, is based on the short story by David Constantine and his 2021 two-part television drama The North Water, starring Colin Farrell, is an adaptation of Ian McGuire’s outstanding novel.
All of Us Strangers is loosely drawn from the 1987 novel Strangers by Japanese writer Taichi Yamada.
It’s the second screen adaptation, following the 1988 Japanese film The Discarnates.
It’s Harry who explains the title. He says he always felt like a stranger in his own family and when he came out as gay it simply put a label on that strangeness.
If I had to describe in one word what this mysterious, absorbing, slightly surreal film is about it would be love – in all its complexity, beauty and sadness.
