Movie Review: 'All of Us Strangers'

All of Us Strangers (2023)

Directed by Andrew Haigh

Written by Andrew Haigh

Starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy

Release Date August 31st, 2023

Published December 4th, 2023

Imagine returning to your childhood home as an adult and finding members of your family who have long since died, living there. They see the adult you that they never knew but they still recognize you and welcome you inside. You share laughter and memories and tears and promises are made about more visits. That's where the movie, All of Us Strangers from writer-director Andrew Haigh, begins. Adam, played by Andrew Scott, lost his parents when he was quite young. The harm from this traumatic loss has lingered through his entire life. When he returns to his childhood home and is greeted by his parents as he remembered them from youth, the confusion, heartache, and catharsis are bubbling over.

If that's where the story of All of Us Strangers begins, you can't begin to imagine how it ends but I won't spoil that here. Adam is a deeply sheltered and broken man as we meet him. As an adult he lives in an eerily empty apartment building in London. The lonely hallways are underlined by a scene where a fire alarm goes off and Adam retreats from the building surrounded by no one else. As he glances up to the building, there are so few people around that he is able to lock eyes with a neighbor who blew off the alarm and remained in the building. Adam knows he and his neighbor are communicating because no one else is around.

That neighbor is Harry (Paul Mescal) who took their unique meet-cute, Adam glancing up at the building, Harry smiling and waving to him, as an invitation to meet Adam at Adam's apartment. After Adam has returned to the building, Harry is at his apartment door. He has a special bottle of whiskey and offers to share it with his lonely neighbor. The implications here are not subtle, Harry is openly flirtatious and Adam reluctantly so. Despite Harry's charm, Adam sends him away. That's not the last we will see of Harry however, as eventually, Adam's interaction with his late parents, played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, causes him to take a chance on his own potential happiness.

After some coaxing, Harry agrees to come back to Adam's apartment and, for a time, the dark cloud over Adam's head appears to have cleared. He's carrying on a healthy romantic relationship with Harry and he's spending time with his parents who will learn that he is gay. He was far too young to have come out before they died so this is a second chance at coming out that Adam takes with grave earnestness. How each of his parents react to his admission is something you need to see for yourself. I will only say that the two scenes, first with Claire Foy as mom, and the second with Jamie Bell as dad, are unexpected and filled with messy and fraught emotions.

If you are wondering about the paradoxical explanation for how Adam is capable of seemingly time traveling to his past, you're missing the point a little. All of Us Strangers is not about time travel, it's about raw emotional truth, a truth that happens to slowly reveal itself as Adam copes with the loss of his parents deep into his adult years and many years after they'd passed away. The exploration of grief and healing is the heart of All of Us Strangers and the beauty of aching sadness of this idea is unrelenting. The film pushes you to consider what you might do if you could speak to family members you lost, what you might say, and how you hope that they will react.

Secondarily, but just as important, All of Us Strangers is a love story. Adam slowly warming to Harry and falling in love with him is charged with all kinds of feelings. The tenderness with which Paul Mescal as Harry approaches Adam's shyness melts your heart. The passion that they develop radiates off the screen and our hearts soar as they push toward more solid ground in their unexpected romantic connection. That makes what happens next all the more memorable, emotional, and powerful. You will need to see it for yourself to understand. Keep a close ear on the needle drops in the movie as the music of Pet Shop Boys and Frankie Goes to Hollywood primes you for an ending you're unlikely to see coming.

All of Us Strangers left me an emotional mess. I was so incredibly moved by the cathartic scenes with Adam's parents as well as his budding love story with Harry. Andrew Scott's haunted and devastating performance is among the best of any year. He must be an Academy Award nominee and if he's not nominated for Best Actor, it would be a crime. He deserves to win Best Actor, truly, Scott's performance is that strong. that emotional, and just that true. Scott plumbs the depths of Adam's despair and like Adam, he finds a wealth of complicated emotions to explore.

I am not familiar with director Andrew Haigh's previous films but after All of Us Strangers, I'm eager to see everything he does. His work here, in All of Us Strangers is artful and elegant, navigating a complicated two part story with the ease of a veteran filmmaker. The ways in which he marries the stories of Adam's parents and his new romance is so skillful that you likely won't know what is coming as the ending approaches. Don't concern yourself with the metaphysics at play, focus on the emotions at play, the relatable emotional elements that transcend time and space and sexual orientation.

All of Us Strangers is a deeply human story of grief and recovery, loss and learning to live again. It's a gorgeously captured story that fills your heart and breaks it just as swiftly. All of Us Strangers is an emotional rollercoaster and by the end, I was an emotional mess. The movie is so good at telling this story that it was impossible not to get caught up in the heady emotions at play, captured by Andrew Haigh in a disorienting yet not overly complicated way. The visual palette of All of Us Strangers is lovely and slightly off-kilter. Much like the movie, the colors and the visual choices keep you off balance until the world is put right and all is revealed. A freefall converges into a necessarily grounded and deeply emotional ending.

All of Us Strangers is among the best movies of 2023.

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