‘All of Us Strangers’ Review: Andrew Haigh Devastates with a Masterful Story of Love and Loss in the Best Film of the Year

“Is this real?”

The connections to our past can be tenuous, where we lose grasp of even simple memories or they can tether us to them in a way that those foundational moments keep us from achieving any level of personal growth. How often do we get to revisit or relitigate our past and if given the chance, would we?

In Andrew Haigh’s electrifying new film, All of Us Strangers, we’re introduced to Adam (Andrew Scott), a late 40’s film and television writer living alone in a seemingly deserted high-rise on the outskirts of London. He’s working on a script about his working class parents set in the 1980s but can’t seem to get past INT. SUBURBAN HOME. He obsessively watches Top of the Pops, listens to Frankie Goes to Hollywood and attempts to conjure up inspiration by looking at old family photographs of him and parents, who both died in a car accident when Adam was 12. Loosely adapted from Taichi Yamada’s Japan-set 1987 novel, Haigh switches up gender, location and sexualities for his most ambitious film to date – a love story, a ghost story and a story of letting go.

During a fire alarm in his apartment complex, Adam spots a figure multiple floors up who has yet to come down and join the meager amount of people who populate the massive building. Soon enough the mysterious stranger appears at his door in the form of Harry (Paul Mescal), bottle of Japanese whisky in hand, making a very forward pass at Adam, who politely rebuffs the advances of the younger, attractive but slightly creepy stranger. Imagine saying no to Mescal? Couldn’t be me, but I digress.

The casting of Mescal, who is absolutely incredible here, is quite perfect and almost eerie. There is a sense, if you’re an adventurous viewer, that All of Us Strangers could be a bit of a spiritual sequel to last year’s Aftersun, featuring Mescal’s Oscar-nominated turn. There isn’t a literal connection between the films other than Mescal but it’s enough to imagine a cinematic universe where they are, especially for a metaphysical and metaphorical story like this.

And it is the metaphysical and metaphorical returning to his childhood home that gives Adam’s story its weight. His nostalgic thoughts of his dead parents begin to consume him and something shifts when he takes the train back to his hometown. Between the subtle cues of Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s reflective score and the hazy allure of cinematographer Jamie Ramsay’s 35mm lens, we’re ever so subtly taken back 30 years, where Adam’s parents (sublimely played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) haven’t aged since their death, with Adam now older than both of them. Their reunion is almost sheepishly cute at first. “Is that him?, Mum asks. “That’s him,” confirms Dad. But it’s also a reunion painted with challenges as Adam still needs to come out to both of his parents (in separate visits). First is Mum, who is as curious as she is disappointed. “It’s a sad life, isn’t it?” she laments and there will probably be several people who will hear those words and they will sting as hard now as they did before, a common refrain from parents at that time (my husband’s mother said this to him verbatim). Foy is exquisite here though, her teased perm and emerald green tracksuit speaking in a contemporary language for the time as much as her words do. When Adam asks his mother “Is this real?” she responds with “I don’t know. Does it feel real?” It does, it is, as Haigh doesn’t present anything in these interludes as supernatural or what we’ve come to expect from a ‘ghost story.’ It’s as real as anything and it both scares and pushes their honesty to unguarded places.

But it’s Adam’s conversation with his Dad that will open the water works (at least they did for me), as Adam details hiding in his room after being bullied at school all day. Dad never asked why and Adam never told why and for the same reason; “I probably would have been one of the ones who bullied you,” Dad says, confirming Adam’s feelings. But Dad, at least this version of him, is far more open and accepting, bringing Adam to tears and most definitely this viewer. As I watched this through saturated eyes, I wondered what I would say to my father, who died when I was 21. We had a very severed relationship and I never officially came out to him in any way (my mother would tell me much later that when I was 3-years old my father said to her “he walks like a faggot”) and if I could find some type of closure to an open wound that’s been there for as long as Adam’s. Do I even need it? I think one of the great powers of storytelling can be two-fold; it can certainly inspire you to do or say something in your real life but simply seeing it onscreen, feeling heard and understood, a vicarious experience can be a shockingly healing salve. My apologies to anyone who sat near me at the Herzog as I was inconsolable in my own moment of self-reflection and memory. It can’t be overstated that Bell and Scott are transcendent in this moment; we’ve associated Scott with his “hot priest” character from Fleabag and as Moriarty in the Benedict Cumberbatch-led Sherlock series, but his vulnerability in this scene is shattering. For Bell, we’ve literally watched him grow up on film, from Billy Elliot to now, playing a father doing his best to find connection with his son. It’s a quiet performance, not simply of restraint but one that allows Scott’s Adam to breathe.

Back in London, Harry returns and this time Adam is more malleable and invites him in. The two engage not in simple small talk but in the rooted fear of intimacy and love that was the 1980s, the era of AIDS and wondering if your next hook up or your next (or first, in some cases) would be your last. It’s one of Haigh’s keen powers, understanding the intricacies of interpersonal relationships whether it’s the rawness of HBO’s Looking, the guarded secrets in 45 Years or Strangers’ closest relative, Weekend. The two discuss using ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ to identify themselves and how the generations word use differs, with Adam definitely in the ‘gay’ camp and Harry remarking “queer is like all the dick-sucking is taken out.” The ice is broken at this point (thanks in part to The Housemartins’ “Build,”) melted, and their bodies do too. They quickly fall into a comfort of domesticity, the kind Adam never thought he’d have (“I’ve never been in love,” he admits at one point). A club scene later in the film, where Harry and Adam do ketamine, begins to break the fabric of what’s real and what isn’t as Blur’s “Death of the Party” rages on.

I called the film a ghost story earlier but I don’t want to give the wrong impression of what that means. It’s not a haunting, Adam’s parents aren’t locked between two worlds. It’s actually Adam that is; carrying the pain and trauma from childhood to adulthood and longing for a way to connect in the middle, to keep seeing his parents and also move forward. But “that’s not how this works,” says mum, and we know the final moments between them are near. And indeed, when the time does come and Dad and Mum offer Adam the affirmations that any child would want, but didn’t know they needed until much later, it’s a devastating master class of writing and performance from Scott, Bell and Foy. For many people who grow up gay, the lack of parental support can feel finite, the same as a physical death, an irrevocable separation. What Haigh has created is a portal of sorts, to reclaim our history, if not exactly rewrite it.

Earlier this year, Celine Song’s Past Lives introduced many of us to the Korean concept of ‘in-yun,’ that the people in our past, even if they’ve touched us briefly, have a permanent effect on our lives, on our connectivity. For Adam, his in-yun exists with the brief time he had with his parents, with his flourishing relationship with Harry and what his relationship to himself will be. Despite all of this emotion, as draining as it is cathartic, the film’s breathtaking finale is not something I’ll likely ever forget. Like 45 Years, Haigh knows how to close a film and the final shot of All of Us Strangers will be a part of me forever. Haigh has created a timeless masterpiece and the best film of the year.

Grade: A

Searchlight Pictures will release All of Us Strangers in the U.S. on December 22.