All of Us Strangers: The Past is Present in a Brilliant Allegorical Tale of Belatedly Faced Grief
By Karen Gordon
Rating: A-minus
There’ve been many films with themes of grief, but few with as much delicacy, introspection and tenderness as writer/director Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, inspired by the novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada.
Andrew Scott, in a gorgeous performance, stars as Adam, a TV and film writer who lives alone in a large modern apartment building somewhere in London. He doesn’t seem depressed, but there is a sense of sadness, or loneliness around him.
Even the building he lives in seems strangely empty. When the fire alarm goes off one dark evening, Adam is the only person who leaves. The building looks vacant except for one apartment, and Adam can see the occupant looking down at him.
Never mind how. Andrew Scott is caught up in a reunion with his late, same-age parents.
The apartment turns out to belong to Harry, (Paul Mescal) who, later that evening, comes knocking on Adam’s door, drunk, carrying a bottle of a good whiskey, and comes on to Adam. Adam, perhaps for a moment considers it, and we can feel that pause between caution and wanting to engage. He refuses politely.
Trying to write one day, Adam seems stuck. Looking for inspiration, he pulls out a box under his bed, with a few random mementos from childhood, an angel topper for a Christmas tree, a cassette tape and a photo album that has a picture of his family’s home in a lovely neighbourhood outside of London.
It inspires him to hop on a train and go back to his childhood neighbourhood, and wander around. In the process, he encounters his father (Jamie Bell), who invites Adam home to see his Mum (Claire Foy). Slightly puzzled, Adam follows him back to his childhood home. The three sit down and catch up.
There are good reasons for Adam to be confused. His parents died in a car accident at Christmas, when he was 12. And yet here they are exactly as he remembered them, on the night they died. And by their clothes and the music they play, we get that that was sometime in the ‘80s. Adam and his parents seem to be the same age.
The strangeness of this aside, Adam, and his parents sit around the kitchen table, as if nothing was odd, and catch up with full knowledge that they haven’t seen each other, or been able to talk to each other, for several decades. Mum and Dad are warm and loving, with Adam and each other. Together, they are a family.
Over the next little while, Adam returns to the house to see them, sometimes together, sometimes one at a time. He also comes out to them, first to his 80’s era mom, as gay.
All of this is having an effect on him in his ‘real life’. He begins to hang out with the more confident Harry, who is sensitive to Adam’s uncertainty, and his emotional reluctance, and turns out to be a compassionate friend as well. The two begin a relationship, while Adam keeps returning to spend time with his parents.
How is this happening? What’s going on here? Where we look for some answers, Haigh chooses to leave these things as mysteries. We don’t get timelines for the visits. Forget the usual movie ghost tropes. No metaphysical expert shows up explaining what’s going on. Things just happen.
And yet, this is a ghost story, about the many ghosts in our lives - the real ones, loved ones we lost , sometimes without closure, those who have passed out of reach, often leaving us with unfinished business, uncertainty and fears.
It’s about the ghosts within us, the ones we hold in our psyche, that haunt us and hold us back, until we can look at them and maybe set ourselves free. For Adam, who is living a fairly successful life, we see that the death of his parents is an emotional trauma, that he has yet to completely reconcile.
Remarkably for a film that deals with so much loss, longing and yearning, Haigh has managed a delicate balance. Adam is obviously stuck, sad, grieving. But the movie isn’t at all weighed down by sadness. And for a movie that deals with things both nostalgic and sentimental, All Of Us Strangers never falls into the traps that can undermine the emotions in the movie, and tank them, making the whole enterprise feel false and manipulative.
Instead the film’s emotions feel true, and carry us along. And although we can see and feel Adam’s sadness, the love and compassion and the way Adam is processing all of this draws us in. However many mysteries, whatever the depth of what’s going on, a sense of gentleness pervades.
A major factor in making this work as well it does are the performances, which are pitch perfect. We see Bell and Foy believably parent their now adult son, taking him in, trying to understand him and how that affects them. Mescal’s compassionate and loving boyfriend is a grace-note in the movie.
But the center of the film is Andrew Scott’s performance of exquisite, delicate vulnerability. He gives us an intimate look at a man who is at a place in life where he is aching for connection, but cannot because he has yet to fully process the grief of the 12-year-old boy who lost his parents.
Even though some of this movie takes place at Christmas, All of Us Strangers is an interesting movie to release now, when distributors generally go for the big crowd pleasers, or upbeat, colourful movies.
But, the reality is that this is also a time of year when people often feel the losses of loved ones more keenly.
Haigh may leave us with many mysteries in this film, but one of the things it speaks directly to is the importance of love, understanding and compassion. And in many ways that makes it an ideal movie for the season.
All of Us Strangers. Written and directed by Andrew Haigh. Stars Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy and Jamie Bell. Opens in theatres, Friday, December 22.