What is real? Is it the physical world around us that, as Lily Tomlin once put it, is really nothing more than a collective hunch, or is it the emotional world we construct for ourselves from memory, and pain, and hope? Andrew Haigh’s enigmatic meditation of a film, ALL OF US STRANGERS considers just that in a work that is heartbreaking in its bittersweet melancholy and searing intimacy.
Andrew Scott stars as Adam, a writer of scripts who lives a life of depressive isolation in a huge building with only one other tenant. When that tenant, Harry (Paul Mescal), knocks on Adam’s door late one night with a bottle of whiskey and an offer of any sort of company that Adam would like, he is rebuffed. And Adam is deeply disconcerted. He is in the midst of writing a script about his childhood, which has prompted him to open a storage box from his childhood, and to remember the best and worst time in his life: when his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) died just before he turned 12. The trauma from which he has never really recovered is still raw, and all the moreso for being dredged up for the script.
From here, what is real and what is in Adam’s head becomes moot. What matters is that it not just it feels all too real to find his parents at his childhood home just as he last remembered seeing them. What matters for him and for us is that Adam so desperately needs it to be real no matter how impossible it seems that they are there, delightedly welcoming their now-adult son back. They are as solid as Adam is, pouring drinks, making Adam his favorite foods, and decorating the last Christmas tree they had before the car accident that killed them. Adam doesn’t question it. Instead, he revels in being back with them, glowing with warmth of family happiness, and over the course of several visits to their suburban London home, having the conversations with them about being gay and being picked on in school that he wished he could have had with them had they lived. This turn of events also prompts Adam to take Harry up on his offer, tentatively, shyly, starting a relationship that proves as healing as the one with his newly available parents, and finding a way past the childhood trauma that has burrowed into his bones as adult angst.
This is a master’s class in acting and in filmmaking. Haigh keeps his characters in tight close-up, and in doing so allows them to reveal their souls. Scott has the emotional transparency of a child, and the wariness of a wounded spirit longing for surcease. His Adam doesn’t need to say he loves the pancakes his mother has made for him, his entire being projects it, as it does when fighting his disappointment at his mother’s reaction to his coming out, gently calming her maternal worries about the kind of life he is leading as a gay man with wistful tenderness. When his parents say they are proud of him, and he is overwhelmed with regret and joy, it is heartwarming and wrenching at the same time as Scott’s single tear skims his tentative smile. The fumbling first round of sex with Harry takes on a sweetness and an urgency when an eager but bemused Adam admits he’s forgotten how to breathe during it. He embodies the safe numbness of detachment from any emotional entanglements and the lurking longing for connection with an exquisite quintessence.
Haigh frames all this with urban isolation. There are the deliberate silences, and the building in which Adam and Harry reside encased in a metal frame that could be bars keeping them in, or the rest of the world out. Streets and trains that as the beginning of the film are empty around Adam gradually fill out, the colors take on hues that are narrative cues as well as visual dynamics. It’s not by chance when Harry talks about vampires at the door when he first appears at Adam’s door, and the light hits his teeth in such a way that they take on a feral gleam. Haigh also frames Adam’s visits with his dead parents as more real than the life Adam has been living until then. He makes it the reality that matters, as does Scott, as do Foy and Bell, who make the ordinary in their characters extraordinary for the impact they had, and have, on Adam.
ALL OF US STRANGERS offers delight and devastation, with an ending that will haunt you with the necessity of connection (shades of E. M. Forster), and power of love that exceeds even death.
Your Thoughts?