Film Review: "All of Us Strangers"

Andrew Haigh's new film is a wrenching, beautiful, and devastating exploration of queer love, loss, desire, and family that is not to be missed.

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Warning: Full Spoilers for the film follow. Proceed at your own risk!

I’ve been eagerly waiting for All of Us Strangers, the new film starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal as a pair of queer men who find an unexpected bond. I knew going in that it was going to be one of those films that was going to leave me emotionally wrecked, and so it proved to be. It’s one of those films that engages with some of the most difficult human emotions, particularly grief, loneliness and yes, even love, and it features some career-best performances from Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy, and Jamie Bell.

When the film begins, Scott’s Adam is a lonely middle-aged gay man living in a rather desolate apartment tower in London. One fateful night he meets Paul Mescal’s Harry, lonely and drunk, and though at first he turns him away, the latter ultimately returns and the two strike up a passionate and tender romance. At the same time, Adam makes periodic forays to the suburbs, where he visits the house that he grew up in as well as the shades of his parents, played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, who haven’t aged since they both died in a car crash several decades ago. At first these visitations seem to provide Adam with some much-needed catharsis, but it soon becomes clear that dwelling in the past is keeping him from living in the present, and he has to say goodbye to them, only to have to face an equally devastating revelation about Harry. 

Queer people have a very vexed relationship with time and its rhythms, many of which have traditionally been coded and structured around heterosexuality and capitalism: grow up, get married and get a job, have children, and die. It becomes clear from the beginning that Adam in particular has always existed a bit sideways, due to both his parents’ death when he was only 12 and his internalized sense of shame over his own sexuality. As he confesses to Harry, he often felt that having sex with someone would lead to death (an understandable belief, considering the fact he came of age in the ‘80s). Gradually, however, he comes to share more and more of himself with the younger man, and the chemistry between Scott and Pescal is off the charts. Scott, for his part, perfectly embodies a man who always seems to exist on the periphery of his own life, first guarded and then, gradually rawly open and emotional, a transition enabled by his bond with Harry. 

There’s been much social media discourse about the necessity of sex scenes in movies, and it seems to me that the ones that appear in All of Us Strangers are a reminder of why such moments are of particular importance and necessity for queer audiences, who for so long have been denied the chance of seeing gay sex on-screen in mainsteam film. There’s a fierce, almost desperate, chemistry between Scott and Pescal, which makes their moments of physical and sexual intimacy much more than just two bodies meeting in space. Instead, each of them finds in the other the love and longing and fulfillment that they have been denied from their family, Adam because his parents died when he was very young and Harry because, as he says, he’s always been on the margins of his. Their union is both carnal and deeply, piercingly spiritual, a meeting both of the body and out of it. 

While the romantic and sexual bond between Adam and Harry occupies much of the film, just as important are those moments that the former gets to spend with the ghosts of his parents. Claire Foy and Jamie Bell have never been better, They seem to exist in some liminal space, one where they are frozen just as they were in the 1980s, with all of the prejudices and assumptions that entails. Foy, as she always does, captures Adam’s mother in all of her brittle sensitivity, a woman who struggles to understand why her son would want to lead the lonely (and potentially deadly) life of a gay man. Ultimately, however, she accepts her son for who she is, giving her blessing and telling him to look after Harry. With a mother’s keen eye, she’s seen how much he needs it.

For me, though, Jamie Bell gives a truly spectacular performance. He’s the type of man who’s not comfortable talking about his feelings, or having them at all, for that matter. The conversation that Adam has with his father’s shade says a great deal about both of them, and his father has to admit some uncomfortable truths about his inability or unwillingness to accept his sensitive son on his own terms. Fortunately for them both, they get to make peace, and Adam’s father finally tells him that he loves him, insisting that this is the thing that he needs to say before he departs to whatever wants for him on the other side. Anyone who has ever lost a loved one or a parent without having the chance to tell them the truth about who they are will find these scenes hitting them like a spear to the heart: piercing, poignant, and devastating. 

As he did with both Weekend and Looking, Andrew Haigh imbues All of Us Strangers with a unique visual palette, one with rich colors and evocative lighting. As so often, the nuances and questions of the narrative–are Adam’s parents actually there, or are they the product of his imagination? Is Adam himself dead and just living in some sort of purgatory?--are ultimately beside the point. Instead, we’re led to simply immerse ourselves in a world of feeling in all of its marvelous complexity. Like Adam, we are forced to confront loneliness and despair, love and joy, and everything in between. 

Now, it has to be said that your mileage may vary when it comes to the final twist, in which it’s revealed that Harry has been dead the entire time that he has been having a relationship with Adam. In fact, he died on the night that Adam rejected him, presumably due to his drinking. However, the film still gives our characters their own bittersweet happy ending, as the two cuddle on the bed as the camera slowly zooms out. 

Grief, longing, and loneliness all coexist rather uneasily at the heart of All of Us Strangers. The film holds out to us the possibility that reconciliation with our lost loved ones is possible, even as it also forecloses on that possibility. In the end, we always have to say goodbye to the ghosts of our past, so that we can at last learn to live in the present and embrace our own uncertain future. Yet there is still a faint, wistful note of hopefulness in the film’s conclusion. As the camera slowly leaves our two (ghostly?) lovers behind, they gradually become a part of the vast cosmos, united at last.