Review: All Of Us Strangers

Image courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Andrew Haigh's "All Of Us Strangers" is a spectral love story and therapy session, and possibly the saddest movie I've seen this year. It has an ending that is likely to spark debate, but one thing that is likely to be agreed upon is that it is one of the most devastating depictions of loneliness that I've seen in some time.

As the film opens, Adam (Andrew Scott) is alone in his London apartment in a new complex that is seemingly only populated by one other person, a younger man named Harry (Paul Mescal) whom Adam will soon meet. Adam is a screenwriter, but he's seemingly given over to malaise and ennui. One night, Harry knocks on his door looking for a hookup - both men are homosexual, although they at one point have a debate over using the word queer vs. gay - but instead a connection is established.

To overcome his listlessness, Adam begins taking train rides to the town where he grew up with his mother and father, both of whom were killed in a car crash when he was 12 years old. One night while wandering in a field near his childhood home, a man in the distance beckons him to follow. It turns out to be his father (Jamie Bell), who lures Adam back to the place where he grew up and is soon greeted by his mother (Claire Foy).

"All of Us Strangers" is in many ways a ghost story - or, to be exact, ghost stories - but there's no fantastical reason to explain how Adam has stumbled upon his parents at the age shortly before they died. They recognize him as their son from a later point in time and the three take part in series of therapeutic catch-up sessions during which Adam's parents learn about the lonely life of their only son. 

Adam's mother takes the news that he is gay a little harder than his father. She seemingly can't wrap her head around it at first, tells him that he doesn't look gay (which garnered a laugh from the audience when I saw the film), and fears that he will, as a result, live a lonely life. 

Despite her backward way of thinking - Adam's parents died in the late 1980s - she is correct about her son being lonely and seemingly disconnected from others. And despite Adam being an openly gay man, he is nearly asexual, and appeared to be scared off from sex by the AIDS epidemic as a young man. Adam's father feels terribly that his son was bullied as a boy, but in a devastating moment admits that he would have likely bullied a young queer kid himself.

This is one of the loneliest feeling films I've seen in some time. The picture opens with Adam looking out of his window at the desolate London skyline, he and Harry are the only people in his building, and there's a scene near the end in which Adam and his parents eat at a diner as a ritual of sorts and the only other person seemingly there is the waitress. The only heavily populated sequence in the film is a nightclub scene and that moment is its most nightmarish. 

But it's not just the sense of isolation that makes "All Of Us Strangers" so moving. The scenes in which Adam catches up with his deceased parents could have come across as maudlin or, worse, gimmicky but instead they ring true because they feel like what it might be like to catch up with someone with whom you never had a sense of closure; there's no time for bullshitting, but simply getting straight to the point. 

There are two particular lines in the film that have stuck with me. At one point, Adam asks his mother how long she thinks their arrangement - seeing each other again - will last, and she tells him that it's not likely a choice they'll get to make. "I suppose we don't get to decide when it ends," Adam's mother tells him. Later, his father tells Adam that he and Adam's mother are proud of him. Adam notes that he hasn't done anything memorable to be proud of, and his father responds that surviving is the thing about which they are proud.

From the performances from all four actors to the film's varying tones - eerie, haunting, lonely, and even luminous - and its great use of music (the Pet Shop Boys' "Always on My Mind" is used to great effect, while Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "The Power of Love" carries a certain thematic relevance for Adam and Harry's burgeoning relationship), "All of Us Strangers" is an emotional slow burn that marks a creative peak for Haigh and is one of the year's most memorable films.