All of Us Strangers is going to break your heart, and every crack is worth it.
Andrew Haigh's movie is a magical experience exploring universal fears – grief, isolation, loneliness, fear of not being loved – while creating an incredibly touching, personal story about queer trauma. It's extraordinarily unexpected, too.
Ultimately, this is a story about learning how to live with ghosts.
The movie follows Adam (Andrew Scott), a screenwriter who revisits his childhood and his relationship with his parents, who died 30 years ago in an accident.
Now, this is not a flashback-based narrative – All of Us Strangers is not about revisiting the past, but reprogramming it so it's bearable to live with it in the present.
The movie exists within a mysterious space, equally likely to be interpreted as a paranormal scenario where ghosts exist or simply as a hallucinatory manifestation of Adam's corrosive grief. It doesn't matter, really.
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Scott travels back to his childhood home to find his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) exactly as they were before they died. He, however, is a fully-grown man now. The image is striking, bordering on comical, yet still intensely affecting.
Only a superb movie would be able to stick Scott in children's pyjamas and still make us cry with the rawness of what's happening in that haunted house.
For the first time, Adam gets to tell his parents he is gay. He also gets to confront them about not having a better understanding of what he went through as a bullied child. Far from an ideal fantasy, these ghosts are not perfect. They don't necessarily say what he longs to hear. And still, the protagonist is getting the closure he so desperately needs.
In one of the best scenes in the film, the family is decorating their Christmas tree to the sound of Pet Shop Boys' rendition of 'Always on My Mind'.
The lyrics come alive as the mother sings, looking at her son with eyes filled with regrets for love never given and apologies never offered. It's a healing moment for a broken family, and one of the most beautiful movie moments of the year.
While exploring unfinished business with his parents, Adam starts getting close to the only other person living in his near-empty London apartment block, Harry (Paul Mescal), who one day shows up at his door looking for company.
Scott and Mescal's chemistry is beautiful, pouring in every heart-on-hand conversation and every incredibly sensual sex scene they share on screen.
Haigh nails this relationship in the vein of his 2011 movie Weekend. The filmmaker is hardly a stranger when it comes to exploring meaningful, complex connections, as well as the emotional burdens queer people carry.
In All of Us Strangers, he seems to rely on contrasts to dismantle preconceived ideas.
There are tensions between the present and the past, how it used to be and how it is. The cold city turns out to be a place of acceptance among unrelated people, while a home in the suburbs is the one that is full of strangers. The idea of the 'chosen family' is essential for the LGBTQ+ community.
As Harry says in one scene: "I always felt like a stranger in my own family."
All that is connected by public transport, which Haigh focuses on often. The constant movement between contrasts is what creates restlessness in Adam's life — the incessant travelling between the past he can't let go, and the present he can't fully live in.
Through drug-induced nightmarish sequences and Adam's distorted reflections on countless mirrors and windows, All of Us Strangers takes viewers into an emotional storm crafted to perfection.
The movie's performances, visual language, song choices, emotional scope — everything is on point, utterly devastating and still soul-healing.
Since Adam is a writer looking for inspiration, this is also about how stories help us live through memories, keeping people alive when they're no longer here and allowing us to tell them things we'd never had the chance (or the nerve) to in real life.
Stories help us deal with grief, understand it, embrace it, and live with it. This movie deals with all that in the most mystical, heart-rending way.
All of Us Strangers is out now in cinemas.
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Mireia (she/her) has been working as a movie and TV journalist for over eight years. Based in the UK, she is a former deputy movies editor at Digital Spy, and previously worked for the Spanish magazine Fotogramas. Mireia's work has been published in other outlets such as Esquire and Elle in Spain, and WeLoveCinema and GamesRadar+ in the UK. She is also a published author, having written the essay Biblioteca Studio Ghibli: Nicky, la aprendiz de bruja about Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service.
During her years as a freelance journalist and film critic, Mireia has covered festivals around the world and has interviewed high-profile talents such as Kristen Stewart, Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal and many more. She's also taken part in juries such as the FIPRESCI jury at Venice Film Festival and the short film jury at Kingston International Film Festival in London. LinkedIn
