For Sight & Sound, I reviewed the new feature by Andrew Haigh – a deeply affecting, time-slipping film about a middle-aged gay writer grappling with the profound consequences of grief and structural homophobia. You can also read the review on the S&S website here.
In an early scene in All of Us Strangers, Adam (Andrew Scott), a gay man entering middle age, leaves his central London flat to visit the suburban area where he grew up. Across a field, he spots a handsome man (Jamie Bell) who returns his gaze. Keeping some distance between them, they walk with nonchalant purpose in the same direction, crossing woodland, convening on a shop to buy booze and fags. “Shall we go?” the man asks. “Where?” Adam replies. “Home,” comes the answer.
Home is not just where the man lives. It is where Adam spent his childhood. The man is his father. But not his father as an old man – as a young man, younger than Adam is now, still living in the 1980s house and mindset familiar from Adam’s youth – yet somehow now available, alongside Adam’s mum (Claire Foy), for social encounters, reminiscences and accountings. This is not a hook-up, then. Rather, Adam is cruising the past, seeking meaning and connection, an unlocking, a release, a path. He is a blocked writer but also a traumatised queer person reckoning with the intimate and profound consequences of structural homophobia and his parents’ deaths. He wants to go home and to find a home and needs to learn the difference between the two.
Written and directed by Andrew Haigh, the film is based on a 1987 Tokyo-set novel by Taichi Yamada. Haigh adapted it himself, shifting the protagonist’s sexuality and placing the story in contemporary London. Adam lives in a new tower, perhaps around Nine Elms, the most Ballardian spot in the city these days. His psychological alienation is accentuated by seemingly being one of only two residents: the other, Harry (Paul Mescal), is younger, also gay, also struggling. The two begin to connect, tentative and hungry, complementary and chafing. There are striking levels of intentionality, vulnerability and desire in their dynamic, superbly realised by Scott, rueful and pensive, and Mescal, puppyish and volatile. By contrast, Foy and Bell, also excellent, depict a couple seemingly more driven by convention than intention. They are loving and decent but not inclined to question or reshape their world, let alone recognise its capacity to harm their son.
The story’s magic-realist structure enables an almost dreamlike dramatisation of the unconscious turmoil such conditions have generated for generations of queer children like Adam: these people, my straight parents, are my best hope of love and support, and also apparently incapable of understanding and nurturing me as I actually am. Like Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman (2021), which uses a similar timeslip concept, Haigh’s film is engaged with generational patterning and the impact of grief; but it is more invested in exploring the possibility of ultimately irreducible difference. Adam’s parents remain at once comforting and apart. When, dressed in childhood pyjamas that don’t reach his wrists or ankles, he cuddles up in their bed, we feel the cosy warmth. But they are not given names.
Their everyday inadequacies are understood structurally, their homophobia less motivated by hatred than heedless, fearful ignorance. The dismissal of emotional expression as “poofy shit”, the supposition that coming out heralds “a very lonely kind of life”, the reflexive notion that “[no] parent wants to think that about their child”, much less take any steps to mitigate its consequences – such notes convincingly evoke the banal and crushing mainstream understandings of the time. Meanwhile, the film’s soundtrack pays glorious tribute to the queer sensibility then hiding in plain sight in the charts: Erasure and Alison Moyet pop up while lyrics to Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Pet Shop Boys hits are woven into the screenplay to poignant, devastating effect. The period production design is spot-on too. The film here brings to mind Blue Jean (2022), Georgia Oakley’s powerful period feature about Thatcherite homophobia, which takes its title from a 1984 Bowie single.
All of Us Strangers chimes too with Haigh’s own earlier work: 45 Years (2015) was structured around the discombobulating return of the past while Greek Pete (2009) and Looking (HBO, 2014-16) followed gay men in search of meaning and belonging. Most resonant is Weekend (2011), Haigh’s comparably thoughtful and incrementally intense portrait of gay men connecting across difference and trauma. Those characters are still young, not yet thinking of parents as peers, but still thinking of them. At one point in Weekend, one of them pretends to be the other’s absent father in hopes of recuperation, a gambit writ large in All of Us Strangers. “Everything’s different now,” Adam tells his mother across the decades. Yet queer alienation persists.
All of Us Strangers played at the London Film Festival 2023 and is released in the UK on 26th January 2024.
