Andrew Haigh is a master storyteller of love stories, both about budding connections (Weekend) and lifetime marriages falling apart (45 Years). He’s also one of the best contemporary chroniclers of gay lives (Weekend, HBO’s Looking). In All Of Us Strangers, he combines these elements to arrive at a story even richer than what he has done before. This is a film about a new and exciting love tinged with sadness, and it’s also about how to reconcile unresolved feelings between parents and their adult children. It’s a film about first and last chances at love, redemption, and healing wounds. All Of Us Strangers tells how continuing relationships—those that last a lifetime—can bring so much joy because of the strong connections they engender, yet also bring so much sorrow because of the expectations they come with.
Haigh’s protagonist feels like a stand-in for the writer/director. A middle-aged successful screenwriter in London named Adam (Andrew Scott) is still reeling from the death of his parents in a car accident when he was 12 years old. At the same time that he meets a new younger neighbor, Harry (Paul Mescal), he reconnects with his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) being the same as they were when they died in their mid-30s. The metaphysical aspects of the story are never fully explained, nor do they need to be. Haigh trusts the audience to understand and his actors to explain this peculiarity with their stirring and sincere performances.
The specificity of All Of Us Strangers doesn’t just come from Haigh sharing personality outlines with his protagonist. He took the novel Strangers by Japanese author Taichi Yamada and set it in London, changing the gender of the two lovers from a man and a woman to two men. And to cap it all off he filmed the scenes with the parents in his actual childhood home. The film is steeped in particular detail true to the period it depicts, from the soundtrack songs to the production design and costumes to the performances of Foy and Bell. They both bring out the 1980s in their cadence and when convincingly and heartbreakingly relaying how people born in the 1950s might feel about their queer children.
Scott has the enormously difficult task of delivering his character’s internal psychology while mostly being an observer. Adam doesn’t talk much, he is unable to fully express himself. Growing up an orphan and gay during the post-AIDS years have rendered him almost emotionally stunted. Only when his parents start embracing him as an adult is he able to open up to Harry. Scott’s performance is all in the eyes, which carry a deep well of sadness. Slowly smiles start forming at the periphery of that sadness. It’s the sort of performance most won’t notice as it’s unfolding in front of them, but will recognize its potency when the film reaches its apex.
Scott gets at least one therapeutic scene with each member of this small but fantastic ensemble. Adam and Harry fall tentatively in love, but they are both broken people. Slowly they open up to each other about growing up gay, about complicated familial relationships, and about how latent homophobia is still pervasive despite the so-called advances in gay rights. They talk about the generational divide and how their experiences are different and the same concurrently. Haigh loves to fix his camera on faces from many angles and allow the actors’ expressions to convey the character’s thoughts and desires, and here Mescal matches Scott look for look and anguish for anguish. But that’s not all they give; there’s also joy in each other and an electric charge to their physical connection. Both are open-hearted performances, fearless in laying bare their sensitive souls.
When Bell and Scott first interact on screen, they share furtive, desirous glances. The question immediately arises: is this a hookup? Is this attractive man here to complicate Harry and Adam’s romance? As the truth is revealed, their connection becomes all about getting one more chance for Adam to finally hear what he always needed from his father. But it’s never that easy for Haigh’s characters. In both the writing and Bell’s performance there’s a reticence that feels so poignant because it’s rooted in truth. This man, with these values of his time, might move an inch but never a mile.
The emotional wallop of All Of Us Strangers is left to Foy. The relationship between gay men and their mothers is a special one. Haigh fully understands that and in Foy he found the right actor to convey a multitude of emotions and a generation of women simultaneously. Her performance is as specific in period as is Haigh’s writing. Foy uses her voice to emphasize certain words that give away how her character feels. When she looks at Adam, her now adult son, there’s admiration, love, desire and a tinge of disappointment. So many different feelings flicker on her face at all times. The character is mercurial, warm, cold and loving at the same time. Foy registers all that and more. When Adam finally gets the absolution that he always needed but never knew he wanted, a generation of gay men, who had the same relationship with their mother, will be healed too. All of this is because of the way Foy delivers the last few words her character utters. This is a spellbinding performance; Foy has never been better.
Haigh is not only able to write character and emotion so well, as a filmmaker he’s able to render these emotions into poignant images. The fantastical elements of the story are believable because they appear sometimes as hallucinations, as visuals and ideas far too beautiful to be real. As Harry tells Adam “I know how easy it is to stop caring about yourself,” ultimately All Of Us Strangers says that only a lucky few get to free themselves to accept love and redemption. It’s a heartbreaking and sad notion, but when delivered with as much sensitivity and visual panache as Haigh does, it becomes cathartic.
All Of Us Strangers opens in limited theaters on December 22