‘All of Us Strangers’ is a Beautifully Aching, Sensuous Odyssey (Review)
Andrew Haigh’s tenderly haunting, impeccably-acted drama All of Us Strangers takes the slow, steamy route to gay romance.
A quiet, intimate, almost immersive movie experience, All of Us Strangers pierces deep for a romantic drama with so few moving or speaking parts. Yet, not a single line or shot is wasted in this powerfully moving story of a man terrified by loneliness.
Andrew Scott stars as Adam, a 40-something writer who lives alone in his tidy London flat, several stories above the city, seen twinkling in the night outside his window. Somehow, despite all that life teeming below, Adam’s newly constructed building sits nearly empty, except for one handsome neighbor.
His name is Harry, and he’s played by Aftersun Oscar nominee Paul Mescal, looking like a local soccer stud with a pornstache and puppy-dog eyes. As Adam’s luck would have it, neighbor Harry is exceedingly lonely, too. He shows up at Adam’s door, eager to hang out and do…whatever.
Adapting Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers — in which the protagonist and neighbor are a man and woman — writer-director Andrew Haigh (Weekend) pointedly spins the story as a same-sex romance. The condition of loneliness is, after all, according to stereotype, par for the course for gay men.
And the path to hooking up is notoriously brief. Once the hook has been baited with Adam and Harry glimpsing each other from afar, the two find themselves face-to-face, breath to breath, where it appears that, though Adam may fear being alone, he also seems skittish about intimacy.
The why becomes apparent as the film takes a turn deeper into Adam’s psyche and troubled history. Working on a project about his deceased parents, he hops a train to the burbs and returns to his childhood home, seeking inspiration. Instead, he gets the surprise of his life, when he’s welcomed at the house by his Mum and Dad (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, both superb), looking just as he knew them before they died, over 30 years ago.
“Is this real?” asks Adam, for whom the encounter feels too good to be true. He can see his parents, touch them, and talk to them. He’s now older than they ever lived to be, and they want to know the man he’s become. Adam spends an idyllic evening with Mum and Dad just catching up, and he doesn’t question his sanity, or sense any danger, just the pure love he shares with two people whose absence has completely changed him.
It does seem real, watching Scott’s beautifully transparent performance, as Adam gives in to the joy of the family reunion. His eyes, and the camera, absorb every detail in close-up. Like a boy again, he revels in their undivided attention. Of course, he agrees to come to see them again.
Shifting between Adam’s visits home, and his sweaty, hands-on, clothes-off affair with Harry, the film unfolds in dream-like dissolves, lit with the warm glow of memory. Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s icy, ambient score adds to the air of mystery. So does Harry’s steady supply of ketamine. One rough night, Adam goes to sleep in his apartment, and wakes up in his childhood bedroom on Christmas morning with Mum and Dad.
Real or imagined, Adam’s parents are as captivating to him as his new romance, if not more, because of so many feelings left unresolved since they died. They never knew he was gay, which puts him in the awkward position of having to come out now to parents who died in the 1980s. His mother, in particular, reacts strongly, in perhaps the movie’s most deftly-handled scene, thanks to Foy’s subtly biting portrayal.
Foy and Bell tap into Mum and Dad’s palpable love for their son, while also, with the assistance of apt attire, capturing the otherworldly presence of people stuck in another time. Figures from Adam’s past, they’re mesmerizing to him, and we can see and admire them through his eyes, in large part due to Scott’s endearing, expressive turn.
Offering a devastating depiction of grief and isolation, Scott’s performance is also spiked with a genial, lusty streak of desire. Between tears of sorrow and loss, Adam sheds tears of joy, even ecstasy, in his steamy, wet hookups with Harry. Scott and Mescal’s rapport supplies its own mesmerizing charge to the slow-burn connection between two lonesome strangers.
While with his parents, Adam tends to lament the past — with Harry, he can see the burgeoning light of a hopeful future. As it turns out, he can’t have both, and must choose which reality to pursue in this aching yet sensual odyssey to a plane where life and afterlife meet, and love drives away loneliness.
All of Us Strangers (★★★★★) is playing nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com for tickets. Locally, it is at the AFI Silver in Silver Spring (www.afisilver.afi.com), the Anjelika Mosaic in Fairfax (www.angelikafilmcenter.com), and the Alamo Drafthouse on Bryant Street in D.C. (www.drafthouse.com).
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