All of Us Strangers

Andrew Haigh has been one of the most consistently underrated directors working in British cinema — Weekend (2011), 45 Years (2015), the TV series Looking — and All of Us Strangers is the film that finally brought him the attention he was owed. It is also, I think, the best thing he has made: a ghost story that is not really a ghost story, a love story that is not quite a love story, and a film about the grief of growing up gay in the 1980s that refuses every available form of sentimentality.

Adam (Andrew Scott) is a screenwriter living alone in a half-empty tower block in London. His only neighbour is Harry (Paul Mescal), who is lonely and drinking too much and interested in Adam. Adam’s parents died in a car crash when he was twelve. He travels back to his childhood suburb and finds them there — still the age they were when they died, still living in the house he grew up in — and begins visiting them.

The Conversations We Never Had

The conceit of the film is simple: Adam gets to have the conversations with his parents that he never had. He gets to come out to them. His mother (Claire Foy) takes a moment to adjust and then says, quietly, that she just wants him to be happy. His father (Jamie Bell) takes longer but gets there. These scenes should not work as well as they do. They should feel like wish-fulfilment, like therapy dressed up as cinema. They work because Haigh — and Scott, whose performance is one of the finest in recent British film — never lets them become easy. The conversations are halting, specific, sometimes painful. The parents are imagined through the filter of a twelve-year-old’s memory, and the film is honest about that distortion.

“What Adam is mourning is not just his parents but the relationship they never got to have — the adult relationship, the one where he could have shown them who he became. Haigh understands that some griefs are for futures that never happened.”

Mescal as Harry is warmth and damage in equal measure. His scenes with Scott are tender and frightened and lit by Yan Engels in the deep blues and pinks of late-night London. The Pet Shop Boys’ Always on My Mind plays at a crucial moment and it is, absurdly, exactly right.

The film’s ending is not the ending you expect. I will not say more except that it is consistent with everything the film has been doing and it is devastating. All of Us Strangers is a rare thing: a film that is precisely as sad as it needs to be, not one frame more.