All of Us Strangers | Review
Andrew Scott stars in this haunting spiritual drama with a muddled finale
SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers for All of Us Strangers
What would you do if you saw your dead parents? What questions would you ask them? What questions would they ask you?
Would you be able to see each other as equals or merely strangers passing by?
These are the questions at the heart of Andrew Haigh’s fantasy romantic drama, All of Us Strangers, a movie that often transcends the tangible and transports us to a metaphysical dreamscape both haunting and beautiful.
Roughly inspired by the Japanese novel Strangers, the movie tells the story of lonely screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott, Sherlock, and Fleabag), who lives a sad and mundane existence. He is utterly alone. Gay and in his early 40s, his friends have all moved from London to be closer to family; he is isolated in a creative quagmire in a near-empty tower block.
His lonely existence is only shaken after a romantic encounter with a mysterious neighbor (Paul Mescal) when he finds himself at his childhood home reconnecting with his parents. But here’s the rub: his parents (Jamie Belle and Claire Foy) have been dead for 30 years. Both were killed in a car crash on Christmas Eve.
Age has not touched them. His parents look just as they did the day they died.
Over the course of several weeks, Adam has the chance to do what every living soul dreams of: Having just a few more moments with the ones we lost too soon.
He comes out as gay to them; he tells them about how much the world has changed, and they tell him just how much he is loved.
But the more he spends time with them, the more he unravels. Gifted with a second chance, Adam begins to desperately grasp at the past at the expense of the present. Ultimately, he is forced to choose between the comfort of his parent’s love and the fear of a new love whose future is unknown.
If the movie's tagline is any indication, let me assure you that this movie will tear your heart out. Podcaster and movie affiacando Sean Fennessey succinctly describes the movie’s ethereal power:
If you’ve lost a parent, this movie has metaphysical powers.
Even if you haven’t lost a parent, this movie still holds you in a dream-like state. While these characters are singular and unique (performed to a tee by four incredible actors), they each feel like mirrors for the audience to gaze into and see the loved ones we’ve lost reflected back at us.
I won’t lie; few movies have as deeply affected me as this one. I cried more at this movie than any movie in recent memory—and my friends and family can attest that I cry a lot in the movies.
For the first 100 minutes of its 105-minute runtime, director-writer Haigh darts gracefully between the fantasy and the mundane, placing the weight of the film on its four powerhouse performances.
In a world not defined by “Barbenhiemer,” Scott, Mescal, Bell, and Foy would all be in serious awards contention for their beautifully honest performances. If one of them hit a false note, it would have thrown the whole movie off its axis. Thankfully, they sing in harmony. Its theatrical, dialogue-heavy script wisely focuses on the human rather than the story's fantastical elements. Few answers are given, even as the questions pile higher.
But for all the beauty and all the cathartic moments, the last five minutes threaten to derail the entire enterprise. Undermining the main character’s growth with a perplexing twist, Haigh reveals that Mescal’s character was also a ghost—having died soon after their first encounter.
That’s right: everyone but Adam is dead.
This cheap revelation waters down the cathartic farewell between Adam and his parents, stunts the impact of the protagonist's emotional arc, and confuses the audience as to what is real and what isn’t.
But maybe that was Haigh’s point. The film often leaves the audience wondering what is real and what isn’t. But the problem with that theory is that the reveal lacks any of the spiritual ambiguity that permeates the rest of the movie.
Billy Wilder once said that one of the best screenwriting tips is to let the audience add up two plus two. Do that, and they'll love you forever. With the twist ending, Haigh added up two plus two and broke down how he got there.
There’s a world where Haigh could have explored the reality of Mescal’s character through clues and slights of hand, much like Ridley Scott infamously did with Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard in Blade Runner. That would have least made the dialogue around the movie more interesting. Sadly, it’s not to be.
Problems with the finale aside, I choose to love the movie for what its first 100 minutes are: spiritual, cathartic, and hauntingly human. It’s a movie worth discovering and pondering for years to come.