From the first shot of a city bathed in melancholy, All of Us Strangers opens the door into a morose, passionate, and twisted world, and then locks you inside.
Just as concerned with the chasm between parent and child as it is with the unfolding experience of new romance, Andrew Haigh’s film is a kaleidoscopic depiction of loneliness, longing, and love.
Adam (Andrew Scott) is a struggling screenwriter, his listless attitude and depressive mindset vividly represented in the physicality of Scott’s acting. In an almost empty apartment block, Adam is barely touching the surface of life, floating from room to room, reheating takeaway food, and slipping into the numbing mindlessness of daytime television.
Adam’s monotonous routine is interrupted by a knocking at the door, the frame of which holds up a tipsy Harry (Paul Mescal), whose slurred words and vacant eyes suggest a loneliness unsolved by the bottle in his hands. Concerned with the quiet and the half-locked six-floor windows, Harry instigates a relationship with Adam that soon blossoms into a romantic co-dependency.
Underneath the soil in which the roots of this relationship begin to grow, a ghostly presence seeps through Adam’s life. He frequently boards a train to his childhood home, where he visits his parents, elegantly portrayed by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy. They welcome Adam home with a distracted but loving embrace. Their youthful energy and distinctive 1980s fashion can be explained by the fact that they died in a car accident when Adam was twelve.
The internal world of Adam is tender, melancholic, and at times, freakish. Battling with time and memory, Adam fades in and out of his childhood, having the conversations with his parents he never had. Adam is searching for a resolution, but it’s questionable if he ever receives one.
The cinematography flows from tactile, delicate scenes of intimacy to scenes punctured with sharp cuts, flashing lights, and warped vision. It embodies the disintegrating and fragmented nature of its main character’s mind, capturing the shift from reality to fantasy, intimacy to isolation.
Loosely based on Taichi Yamada’s Strangers, the film’s novelistic origins seep through its tender, intimate cinematography and the deeply internal acting from both Scott and Mescal. However, Haigh’s directorial choices construct a beautiful film heightened by its aesthetic quality and deepened by undercurrents of queerness and childhood.
All of Us Strangers explores the generational split between parent and child, and the melding and changing of societal attitudes, particularly with regards to sexuality. After Adam comes out to his mother, she tearfully whispers that “they say it’s a lonely kind of life”.
Though a film strengthened by the immense abilities of its cast, this is undeniably Scott’s masterpiece. He steps into the physicality of this dreamlike world, so utterly inhabiting his character that the scenes in which he reverts back into his childhood are almost heartbreakingly comical.
The film is immersed in the material sensation. Scott captures the indescribable feeling of inhabiting your childhood home, walking down the staircase on Christmas Eve, sitting at the family dinner table, the warmth of a parent’s bed. “It doesn’t take much to make you feel the way you felt”, Adam realises.
Populated with a variety of 80’s hits, the soundtrack of this film is incredibly potent. ‘The Power of Love’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood becomes a touchstone throughout and is evocative of this film’s central message. Love is the only constant; in whatever form it appears in.
For a film so preoccupied with the internal mind, it begs us to reconsider others. It asks us to identify the fragments of ourselves found in strangers, to make true connections, and to look after one another. All of Us Strangers is dizzying and dreamy and will leave you in pieces. Perhaps that’s the point.