All of Us Strangers (2023): The Grief You Didn't Know You Were Still Carrying

The Story

Adam (Andrew Scott) is a screenwriter living alone in a nearly empty London tower block. The only other apparent occupant is Harry (Paul Mescal), a younger man in the flat below who knocks on Adam's door late one night, drunk, wanting company. Adam sends him away, then can't stop thinking about him.

Adam, separately, begins visiting the house where he grew up — and finds his parents there. His parents died in a car accident when he was twelve. They are in the house in 1987, the year they died, unchanged, and they can see him and speak to him, and the film does not explain this.

The two narratives — Adam's developing relationship with Harry, and his visits to his dead parents — are the film's two simultaneous love stories: the one he is trying to find now, and the one he lost too early to fully mourn.

The Ghost Story Structure

Haigh adapts Taichi Yamada's Japanese novel Strangers (1987) and transports its ghost story structure to contemporary London while preserving its emotional logic. The ghosts are not horror. They are desire: the desire to have more time with the people you've lost, to say what was left unsaid, to be known by them as the adult you've become rather than the child they remember.

The film refuses to explain or rationalise the supernatural elements. They are simply there, a fact of the world it inhabits, and the refusal to explain them is the point. Grief doesn't explain itself. Loss doesn't resolve. The film's form enacts its subject.

Andrew Scott

Scott's performance is the film's centre and its most exposed element. Adam is a man who has been living at a remove from his own life — the half-empty tower block, the isolation, the sense of a person who has never fully arrived — and Scott plays this without the sentimentality that would make it bearable.

He is also, in his scenes with Mescal, something else: present, vulnerable, learning how to be looked at by someone who wants to look. The difference between Adam in the tower block and Adam with Harry is the film's most sustained argument — the difference between survival and living, between endurance and desire.

The scene in which Adam, wearing his father's clothes, dances with Harry in his childhood bedroom to Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "The Power of Love" is the most purely beautiful gay moment in recent British cinema. It is nothing but love, and it knows it.

Paul Mescal

Mescal plays Harry with an openness that is the complement to Scott's guardedness: a man whose desire is uncomplicated by the history that complicates Adam's, who wants what he wants and is willing to wait for it. His warmth is the film's warmth, and it is entirely earned.

The sexual and emotional chemistry between Scott and Mescal is the film's foundation, and it holds everything else up. Without it, the ghost story would be grief without relief. With it, the grief has somewhere to land.

The Parents

Claire Foy and Jamie Bell as Adam's parents are extraordinary — not because they are asked to do extraordinary things, but because what they are asked to do is so specifically right. They are parents who never had the chance to know their gay son, and the film gives them that chance retroactively: the conversation Adam could not have had with them in 1987 is had now, in the ghost-house, with the parents who are learning who he is.

The scenes have the quality of emotional mathematics: grief added to tenderness, multiplied by impossibility, equalling something that does not have a name but that the film insists is real.

The Music

The film's use of 1980s pop music — "The Power of Love," Pet Shop Boys, the specific sound of a gay man's childhood in Thatcher's Britain — is as precise and as emotionally freighted as the use of Mama Cass in Beautiful Thing or Sufjan Stevens in Call Me by Your Name. The music does not illustrate. It carries.

Why It Matters for BoysDo

BoysDo is for the viewer who believes that gay desire deserves the full weight of serious art. *All of Us Strangers* is that argument at its most complete: a film that takes gay male grief — the specific grief of loss in childhood, of growing up in a world that required hiding, of arriving at adult desire carrying all of that — and gives it a ghost story to live inside and a love story to move toward.

Haigh made Weekend for two men in Nottingham. He made this for all of us. It knows exactly what it is doing to you.