Writer and Director: Andrew Haigh
One of the BFI London Film Festival’s “must-see” movies of 2023, Andrew Haigh’s beautiful and moving All of Us Strangers is an elegiac reflection on grief and urban loneliness. While the combination of Andrew Scott and Paul Mescale will be enough to draw the crowds, Haigh’s unusual story and emotional control combines two rather tender love stories, one unpicking a parent-child relationship and the other a romantic connection. Guided by the echoing vocals of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s The Power of Love, All of Us Strangers is also the Festival’s major weepie.
Living alone in an uninhabited tower block in London, screenwriter Adam has a beautiful view over the city he has all but disengaged from. When Harry comes into his life after a chance encounter, an intense and passionate affair begins. But Adam is troubled by the death of his parents when he was 12 years old and suddenly finds himself able to see them again.
Haigh’s film deals with different levels of unreality, first shaping the isolation and introversion of Adam before introducing the warmth and cosy contentment he experienced in his parents’ 1987 home. Visiting them but as his adult self and discussing what his life has become – including coming out to his shocked mother still trapped in her 1980s attitudes – sounds like a strange premise and in lesser hands it might seem cloying or overly “magical”, but Haigh plays the interactions as though they are real, as Adam experiences them in his mind, and finds great meaning and heart in the years of his life he has had to lived without them and in the things that, they too, have missed by exiting his life so prematurely.
The exploration of memory and childhood trauma also disguises aspects of character development for Adam that become the driving force of the film. With no line in Haigh’s consuming vision between fantasy and reality, slowly the viewer is asked to question everything else that Adam is experiencing and why Harry is so mysterious. It is noticeable that they never spend any time in Harry’s apartment, that Harry is overly predatory in the relationship but at the same time seemingly devoted, hinting at a similar childhood difficulty that becomes significant both in understanding Adam better and in Haigh’s creation of tension.
Scott is well known for his deeply emotive performances and here his Adam slowly crumbles while believing he is finding the comfort and solace he needs. The fragility of the character but also his certainty and ease with his sexual choices is finely balanced, and Scott digs into the broken everyday quality with a real naturalism. Paul Mescal’s Harry is a shadowy figure, more unknowable in many ways yet with a believable chemistry with Scott.
Playing Mum and Dad, Claire Foy and Jamie Bell are heartbreakingly lovely as they meet their now grown-up son and come to terms with a world and a life that has moved on without them. Haigh makes everything seem so ordinary in All of Us Strangers but there is an enormous, resonant power in that. A Festival highlight indeed that will stay with you long after its bittersweet ending as you wipe away your tears.
All of Us Strangers is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
