All of Us Strangers, dir. Andrew Haigh
In Andrew Haigh’s most recent film All of Us Strangers (2023), the opening titles appear against the background of a striated and darkly blue sky which lightens as the rising sun reveals a London skyline. As an office building blazes gold, a man’s face is superimposed upon the sky and the view; with a shift in focus we see that he is looking through his window, as we have done. He’s a scriptwriter, Adam—a riveting performance by the multi-talented Andrew Scott (Ripley in Netflix’s Ripley, Moriarty in TV’s Sherlock, the priest in Fleabag and all the characters in Simon Stephen’s version of Uncle Vanya for the National Theatre, London).
Adam spends much of his time away from his desk, roaming his apartment, gazing out of windows, watching tv and eating biscuits out of the packet. The work he’s avoiding is a script about his parents, who died in a car crash when he was twelve.
His indolence, or prevarication—it’s difficult to decide which it is—is disrupted when a fire alarm sends him downstairs and out of the building, an unadorned tower block of many levels. Surprisingly, he is the only person to respond to the alarm. As he gazes up, we see that only two sets of windows are lit: his own and those of someone who, standing at the window, looks down, noticing Adam looking up.
One evening following the fire alarm incident, there’s a ring at Adam’s doorbell, followed by knocking as Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘The Power of Love’ plays on Adam’s tv. It’s Harry, played by the equally talented Paul Mescal (TV’s Normal People, 2021’s The Lost Daughter and 2022’s Aftersun) slightly drunk and more than slightly desperate. Offering Adam a drink—he’s got a bottle of Japanese whisky—Harry’s quite straightforward. He wants to come in. He can’t stand the silence of the building; he’s even bought a white noise machine to offset it, but it sounds like someone in the room whispering about him. He’s scared, and being alone makes everything worse. He saw Adam looking at him from outside the building and he thinks that they are the only residents so far. Standing at the door, leaning on the door’s frame and reflected in a full-length mirror, Harry is doubled. Adam, also afraid, turns away as from a doppelgänger and closes the door.
Haigh’s earlier films and tv series as writer-director include Greek Pete (2009), Weekend (2011), 45 Years (2015), Looking (2016), Lean on Pete (2017) and the tv series The North Water (2018); they cover a remarkable range of topics combined with a subtleness of characterisation that’s found in everything he writes. All of Us Strangers is loosely based on Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, a bleak account of loss, memory and the dangers of living in the past, in which the central character visits the spirits of his dead parents with catastrophic results for his physical and mental health. Haigh’s version is more sympathetic, but no less shocking in its ending.
Before meeting Harry, Adam has taken to visiting his childhood home in Sanderstead, Croydon, an outer London suburb (the house is Haigh’s own childhood home: the personal is never far away in this film). There he finds his parents, still living in the 1980s, who respond with no surprise to his sudden appearance as an adult. They are welcoming and loving. ‘You were a boy’, says his mother, the marvellous Claire Foy, here remarkably ordinary, slightly brisk and down to earth. ‘Look at you. All grown up’, as she insists that he takes off his rain-soaked clothes. ‘I thought you’d be hairier, like your dad’.
Adam tells her that he is gay. ‘Since when?’ she asks, clearly shocked. ‘Forever’, Adam replies. Their conversation, as they drink a mug of tea, is followed shot/reverse shot as the mother comes to terms with his announcement—‘No parent wants to think that about their child’—and Adam, calibrating his responses with care as much for her as for himself, slowly explains the differences between 1980 and his own time. It’s an intelligent piece of filmmaking, and the actors rise as only great actors can to the emotional charges and changes demanded of them. It is one of the most profoundly moving scenes in a film in which moving scenes abound.
Adam’s father, an excellent Jamie Bell (it’s impossible to imagine better casting for any of the characters in this film) is gentle and slightly perplexed. He gazes yearningly at Adam as he comes to realise why his son, who could never catch a ball, cried in his bedroom after school. Holding Adam in his arms now as a grown man, he asks if he can be forgiven, and as the camera turns round, the pair of hands clutching the father’s back become those of Adam as a boy. The adult son’s longing for his father’s understanding and love is raw. It’s another moment of breathtaking filmmaking.
The rapprochement of sorts that Adam achieves with his parents has immediate effect: when Harry knocks at his door a second time, Adam lets him in, and they swiftly become lovers. Then Harry seems always to be there, understanding and loving. Meanwhile, as Adam continues to visit his parents his health begins to suffer: he’s always running a high temperature and he develops a cough.
The background of Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s fine soundtrack is punctuated by many songs from the 1980s—Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘The Power of Love’ and the Pet Shop Boys’s ‘Always on My Mind’ are, if not on repeat, at least often quoted. The intensity of the music rises with the buildup of pressure as Adam becomes less and less able to manage the life he’s leading. A child traumatised by his parents’ death, Adam has, as he says, ‘always been lonely’. It’s a truth he faces when the time comes for his visits to his parents to end. Their last moments together are at a shopping-centre restaurant. When the family meal they have ordered is delivered, it is to Adam, who is once more seated alone.
The suspension of disbelief that a fine screenplay and actors enable ensures that the interactions between Adam and Harry and Adam and his parents are taken at face value, and as truth of a kind. And Adam has no doubt at all that his parents really are there, in their old home, waiting for him, at least for now.
Henri Bergson thought that imagination was ‘an incantation destined to make the object of one’s thought, the thing one desires, appear in such a way that one can take possession of it’. Or perhaps it can take possession of you. All of Us Strangers is a film about imagination and its power. Many reviews contain reports of audiences crying; the narrative of Adam’s life, the rawness of Harry’s fear and need, the beautiful return to the past with the understanding of an adult now able to redress some of the pain and sorrow of childhood, all of which are achieved within the compass of the imaginary, provide for an empathy that has more to do with the power of mimesis itself than with narrative and plot. It’s no wonder that people cry. This is a story about feelings we all recognise: love in its many guises, fear, loneliness, and, at its extremity, dying alone.
Neither Adam, working from home, nor Harry mentions other friends, other workmates; their existence in the empty halls and elevators of their building accentuates the lack of other people, of connection, of any kind of social life that supports them, that turns them from strangers into neighbours, friends. At the end, with Harry long dead, we are forced to recognise that Adam has always been alone and that in that aloneness, he failed to respond to a stranger at his door. This knowledge he contrives to dispel, after he has finally decided to go Harry’s flat, where he finds a decomposing body with an empty bottle of whisky nearby, by imagining Harry back to life. It is perhaps this moment more than any other that gives credence to the idea that Harry is—and even Adam’s parents are—some kind of ghost. But this is to disparage the film’s remarkable articulation of the immense power of desire and memory expressed through imagination. A moment of utter horror is transformed imaginatively into a fairy tale ending, a wish-fulfilment, as in the final scenes we see the pair once more spooned together, fading into starlight.
If that were all, it would already be an extraordinary and powerful film with loneliness and love as its major themes, intertwined with the role imagination plays in the job of living. But imagination cannot, in the end, redeem the quite terrifying lack at the film’s heart. These men are as they are because their existence matters to no one: literally removed from other people in their building—and by the film’s end it is clear that the two only meet once, at Adam’s door, and never again—they represent the collapse of the social ties that once bound communities together. Whether it’s a sense of what is being annealed in the relationship between the two that prompts some of the many tears shed in cinemas, or something else, it’s impossible to know. But now and then, engaging with a representation of something of immense value that’s already fading in the world outside the cinema is enough to elicit the empathy that it is the work of films to engage.