All of Us Strangers review (LFF 2023), Culture Whisper
The concept of ghosts summarises two unanswerable conditions of human nature: the fear of death and the desire for immortality. These are devices favoured by horror movies and stories by torchlight, telling of phantoms that bump into and scream at and prey on the living. But in Andrew Haigh’s seductively somnambulant All of Us Strangers, the ghosts are kind, concerned and inviting.
They’re the dead parents of Adam (Andrew Scott), a lonely 40-something screenwriter working on a new project that dives into his own past. This process inspires a visit to his family home. After a walk through the park, he meets with his dad (Jamie Bell) and, later, his mum (Claire Foy). They’re not smothered in blood, they don’t whisper his name down narrow corridors, and they harbour no ill will in the slightest. They just have a chat.
Such is the moving, nostalgic unreality of the film, reaching into autobiography as much as metaphysics. Haigh modifies the original novel by Taichi Yamada, inserting his own personal story – even the house is the filmmaker's actual family home. Scenes proceed as if in the thrum of a deep dream: elliptical, impossible and persuasive. Jamie Ramsay’s beautifully expressionistic cinematography moves through a labyrinth of psychological pictures, drifting between the real and the fabricated. By the end, you wonder if there’s a difference.
Interlaced with this is Adam’s new romance with a younger neighbour in his desolate London high-rise. The whisky-bearing 20-something Harry (Paul Mescal) could be the first person Adam’s properly spoken to in weeks. It erupts into intimacy: heavy breathing, hands curled on hamstrings, apologies for being out of practice. Harry’s youth sparks some life into Adam’s ennuied self, bolstered by such a Catherine wheel of chemistry between Scott and Mescal. It's perfect casting, likely inspired by the actors' romantic BBC Three elevations via Fleabag and Normal People.
What follows is not a regular haunting, but an experience that resembles psycho-dynamic therapy – like a confrontational, Freudian form of time travel. Adam is a different person to the boy whose parents died: he's matured, and yet he still needs his mum and dad. Foy and Bell provide such tangible performances as the parents. They're ordinary people from a different time, who mean no harm yet unknowingly cause it. Once the positive wish-fulfilment is out the way, the film turns to the more negative sides – largely penetrating Adam’s experience of being gay in the 1980s.
Haigh’s superbly detailed and nuanced writing finds in Mum and Dad the good and bad, the regret and sorrow, the pride and happiness; the typical poles of love and frustration that come with having parents. One poignant scene is scratched onto this critic’s memory: them singing along to the Pet Shop Boys’ version of Always on My Mind, somehow illustrating the kind of love they can’t always express to their child and vice versa. Like any perfect needle drop (and the film has a few), this delicate placement changes the song and how you hear it.
Haigh captures a difficult concept: the power of memory in the physical present. We’re always juggling the two; most of the visual processing in the brain is conducted via stored memories. Past experiences hold such weight in our everyday lives, despite being immaterial. But Haigh makes a fascinating compromise. Adam isn’t just replaying remembered times in his mind’s eye – he’s talking to his parents as if they exist now, fixed in ages similar to his own, like Céline Sciamma’s exquisite magic-realist film Petite Maman. But here, Adam has to face a more tragic reality.
All of Us Strangers is a beautiful, upsetting, and unfailingly human drama bottled in a distorted, traumatised mind – one that can’t let go or doesn’t want to. Grief and loneliness penetrate Adam’s abstract, his very core, and throw him across time, facilitating a wondrous, remarkable piece of emotional surrealism.
Originally published on Culture Whisper
