2023 was a great year for gay characters in cinema from Ira Sachs’ harrowing Passages to Barry Keoghan’s deliciously demented performance in Saltburn. However, the best film about gay lives is Andrew Haigh’s haunting All of Us Strangers. Haigh has been one of the most important voices in gay cinema since his acclaimed 2011 film, Weekend, which tells the story of a short and passionate relationship between two men. He also produced the influential LGBT HBO series Looking and directed its feature-length coda, Looking: The Movie. But the English filmmaker’s reach goes beyond that; both 45 Years (2015) and Lean on Pete (2017) focused on failing relationships and featured straight characters. All of Us Strangers is Haigh’s best work yet though, combining all the elements that made his other films so successful. But it is also his most dense and inscrutable.
All of Us Strangers tells the story of Adam (Andrew Scott), a lonely, middle-aged Londoner who lives in a newly constructed, soulless apartment complex that feels mainly uninhabited. Adam’s life has been marked by tragedy, specifically the deaths of his parents in a car accident when he was 12. His milieu reflects the lonely emotional terrain he traverses. Then, one evening, Adam connects with a neighbor named Harry (Paul Mescal) but rejects the obviously drunken, younger man’s advances.
At the same time, Adam begins taking the train to visit his parents. Yes, those same parents who died in a car wreck 30 years prior. They are played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell and appear to be in their 30s, despite Adam’s middle age. Haigh never explains exactly how Adam is seeing and visiting his parents but in a series of trips, he is finally able to express to them the things about his life that he never had the chance to.
Loosely adapted from the novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, Haigh turns the initial straight narrative into one of healing for his gay protagonist. And just like Adam, it appears Haigh is also exorcising some of his own troubles. Born in 1973, Haigh would have come of age at the same time as Adam during the danger of AIDS. Even though his parents weren’t killed, coming out was difficult for the director. He didn’t tell his family until his mid-20s. Even more telling is that Haigh films these visitation scenes in his own childhood home, capturing period details in that space evocation of his own childhood.
But unlike Haigh, Adam never had the chance to come out to his parents. With this renewed opportunity, he allows his ghostly parents the chance to learn about who he really is. Both Foy and Bell grapple with the news in the way Boomer parents likely would have if they had lived. These visits with his parents allow Adam the peace to connect with his own emotions and he soon begins a passionate relationship with Harry.
All four of the actors are brilliant here. In less capable hands, such a premise could feel laughable, but Haigh and his ensemble handle the material with reverence and great care. In Harry, Adam finds another wounded soul. Together, they begin to heal, and Haigh allows us to experience the joy of this deepening new relationship. Adam’s relationships with his parents are equally well-developed. At first, Bell plays his character as emotionally distant, embodying the stiff-upper-lip reticence of the British working class. Can he accept a son who is gay? Meanwhile, Foy is fantastic as a mother who slowly realizes that she will never experience grandchildren and that her acceptance most of all is requisite for men like Adam.
Nothing and everything makes sense in All of Us Strangers. For those looking for a traditional narrative, you may come up grasping at spectral straws. But the emotional truth and beauty – from sadness to grief to acceptance to pain – is on full display here. Haigh is a master filmmaker who pulls no punches by the time his film unspools to its sadly cathartic end.
Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
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