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Director / Screenwriter: Andrew Haigh

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The many worlds where narrative cinema can take us is one of the form’s most attractive features. We can see what life on Mars might look like if we ever set up shop there (The Martian, 2015), dodge a dragon in a gold-filled cavern (The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, 2013), feel the excitement of high-stakes gambling (Molly’s Game, 2017), or have a thrilling adventure circumnavigating the globe (Around the World in Eighty Days, 1956). We can thank the many directors, actors, cinematographers, and stylists of all sorts for the way they create the visual environments in which we can immerse ourselves.

This all starts, however, with the word. The films I mentioned above were all adapted from books, the vehicle that has nurtured our need to stretch our experiences and imagination for centuries. As a writer myself, I am acutely aware that what I see on screen is an exercise of the writer’s craft made visible. So, my view of Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, adapted by the director from Japanese author Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, definitely is colored by their choice to have their main character make his living as a screenwriter.

We meet Adam (Andrew Scott) in his apartment on the 27nd floor of a boxy, nondescript building somewhere in London. He is trying to write a script on his laptop, but nothing is coming. He lowers the screen, looks through a few old photos, and goes to his refrigerator to grab some leftovers when a fire alarm sounds. Clearly well practiced at high-rise evacuation procedures, he heads down to the street and crosses the road to look up at the building. He sees someone looking back at him from another apartment.

Returning home after the false alarm, Adam gets a visit from the figure he saw at the window. Harry (Paul Mescal), apparently the only other tenant in the building, offers him a slug of whiskey from his half-empty bottle and a chance to hang out or possibly hook up for sex. Adam begs off, but the connection has been made. The next time Harry comes to Adam’s door, he is invited in for oral sex. The men talk afterward, with Adam having trouble using the now preferred term “queer,” which he always found derogatory. Adam is an older gay man who lived in the shadow of AIDS and who hasn’t considered fucking anyone for ages for fear of dying. Harry’s arrival reawakens Adam’s interest not only in sex, but also in companionship and the possibility of love.

We learn through a conversation he has with Harry that Adam’s parents were killed in a car crash when he was eleven and that he is trying to write about them. To that end, he travels by train to Croydon, in South London, to the home in which he was raised. To his astonishment, he finds his parents living in the home, looking exactly as they did the year of their deaths. So begins a series of visits between the three of them during which Adam’s career, sexuality, and the manner of his parents’ death—they know they died—are discussed.

Yamada’s novel carries on his culture’s time-honored tradition of ghost stories and was made into the 1988 horror film The Discarnates by director Nobuhiko Obayashi. While most such Japanese stories take for granted the existence of ghosts and advance in a conventional horror/eerie fashion, Western takes on hauntings like All of Us Strangers tend to the psychological.

Even before we get to Croydon, we can perceive the film’s otherworldly patina. It’s hard to believe that a large apartment building like the one Adam and Harry inhabit would be so empty. At the same time, the environment Haigh creates goes beyond a simple haunting. If we remember that in Jungian psychology, the house is the symbol of the self, then it would appear that Adam is not at home with himself. All is provisional, isolated. And who set off the fire alarm? Perhaps an obviously lonely Harry to see some of his neighbors. It also is entirely possible that it was an internal trigger by Adam himself signaling that some neglected part of his psyche is ready to be tended to.

Director Andrew Haigh is entirely upfront about how personal All of Us Strangers is to him. Haigh envisaged Adam as something of an alter ego, a middle-age gay man and screenwriter. He cast Jamie Bell and Claire Foy as Adam’s parents because they reminded him of his parents, and he filmed the scenes between these characters at the actual home in which he was raised. Thus, the ghosts he conjures exist as avatars of remembrance, psychological need, and emotional honesty.

Throughout All of Us Strangers, Adam flashes back repeatedly to the night he learned that his parents died, suggesting that he may still be suffering trauma from the loss. He even tries to prevent them from going to the party from which they would never return. Foy and Bell completely inhabit the roles of caring parents caught in time and trying to give Adam what he needs. They seem so natural in their affection and actions, making the homecoming scenes both comfortable and impossibly poignant.

Adam gives himself the chance to share aspects of his life and personality with them that they never lived to know. He beams with pleasure when they are impressed that he is a writer, a career they never would have guessed he would pursue. Importantly, he sits down to have a talk with each of them separately about being gay. His mother, inquiring as to why he hasn’t got a girlfriend, is shocked when he says he is into men. Foy expertly runs through the mother’s emotions of anger, fear about his vulnerability to AIDS, and clichés about homosexuality being a “lonely life.” Adam says people don’t really say that anymore and that things are different, but, in fact, his life is lonely. His father reveals that he suspected that Adam was gay and being bullied, but never raised it with him because he confesses he probably would have picked on his son if he were one of his schoolmates.

Adam’s relationship with Harry is one of the best depictions of modern romance I have seen in a long time. Haigh says he has filmed a lot of sex scenes, so he knows how to modulate the pair’s first hook-up to be sexy, but still tentative, as first encounters normally are. The men grow in their mutual familiarity, keeping their love private for a time, but eventually bursting out into the world in a dark, color-saturated disco. (Indeed, cinematographer Jamie Ramsay bathes Adam’s world in glorious color—reds, blues, lavenders, golds—and the bright, suburban hues of life with his parents.) The sensuality of dancing, of being surrounded by sweaty bodies and physical closeness, is something Adam basks in like a ritual bath. Scott and Mescal are exceptionally good, their chemistry and understanding of the dynamics of falling in love fully realized in their performances.

We are not at all surprised that Adam wants to introduce Harry to his parents—but only he can see them. When he breaks into his childhood home to find them, he crosses a line. The next time he sees his parents, they tell him that he needs to stop coming around for his own good. His tearful pleading with them that he needs more time is heartbreaking. But since Adam dreamed them up in the first place, he is really telling himself that he has done the work he needed to do to climb out of his shell and connect to the rest of the world.

Haigh’s variation on Yamada’s title underlines that, in a sense, we are all strangers, imprisoned in the only mind we can hear. Reaching out requires some courage and boundless amounts of empathy for others and ourselves. All of Us Strangers has a surprising ending that blends our experience of real lives and feelings brought to the screen and the strange prerogatives of writers to do with their characters what they will to resolve whatever issues they choose to raise. In the final analysis, Haigh affirms that “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”