ALL OF US STRANGERS
Andrew Scott in ALL OF US STRANGERS. Photo by Chris Harris. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

Andrew Scott has played Sherlock Holmes’ archnemesis and a Bond villain, too. Next Thanksgiving, Paul Mescal will headline a sequel to Gladiator—yes, the Best Picture-winning swords-and-sandals epic from Y2K, several cinematic epochs ago. So we should be grateful that these two fine Irish actors are still playing the more introspective side of their trade in films like the sublime All of Us Strangers, writer-director Andrew Haigh’s haunting magical-realist romantic fantasy. 

Since I’m not clever enough to clarify what that means without resorting to a plot synopsis, I’ll beg your indulgence: Scott plays Adam, a lonely 40-something screenwriter whose current project has him reflecting on his memories of his parents, who perished in a car accident when he was 12 years old. Visiting his boyhood home outside the city, he finds them there—still living, still the ages they were when he lost them in the 1980s, making them younger than Adam is now. Whatever otherworldly plane they now inhabit has a generous visitation policy: They can interact with the adult son they evidently last saw when he was just a boy, and take pride in what he’s made of his life. It’s a restorative reunion for all parties, but there are choppy seas ahead.

Adam has also embarked upon a new relationship with Mescal’s Harry. Adam declines a drunken advance from Harry the first time the neighbor knocks on his door, but the sexual chemistry between these two mumbly hunks is volatile enough that Adam doesn’t hold out for long. Also, they seem to be the only two people who live or ever set foot in their weirdly desolate London high-rise.

In addition to having missed out on their son’s maturation over the past few decades, Adam’s mum and da—played with great sensitivity by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell—are ignorant of recent social advances down here on this mortal coil. (Their house is stocked with VHS tapes and a landline, after all.) Which is why Foy’s character fears her only son is doomed to a sad life as a closet case when he comes out to her. Bell is more readily sympathetic, perhaps because he feels guilty for turning a blind eye to the bullying Adam endured through his early school days on account of being, you know, bad at sports. 

This pair of one-on-one scenes, with Scott opposite Foy and then separately opposite Bell, showcase some of the most restrained and yet most expressive screen acting in recent memory. All three of these actors enjoy prolific and celebrated stage careers, but their ability to calibrate their performances to the intimate key in which Haigh’s camera observes them is its own kind of revelation, apart from whatever sort of solution the metaphysical quandary he lays out here might demand. Of course these scenes carry the weight of a queer “kid” revealing himself to parents he fears may reject him, but also the many other permutations of the parent-child dynamic that unfold over a lifetime, including—purely in subtext—the anguish of an adult watching his own parents wither and fade in old age. I wasn’t at all surprised to read, after seeing the film, that Haigh shot these scenes in his real-life boyhood home. They’re miraculous. Attention must be paid.

Haigh has borrowed the writer-reconnects-with-his-long-dead-parents conceit from Strangers, a 1987 novel by Taichi Yamada (who died in November at the age of 89), while Harry’s role in the story appears to be his own invention. Mescal makes Harry all the more alluring by not suppressing the deeper longings that drive his pleasure-seeking. This makes the character more than a mere device, even while he operates within Haigh’s scheme as a sort of manic pixie dream boy—seducing the reticent Adam, taking him dancing at a club, snorting ketamine with him in the toilets.  

Working with South African cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay, who shot last year’s Living—another nourishing British film freely adapted from Japanese source material—Haigh shot All of Us Strangers on old-timey 35mm film stock, deepening the sense that we’re experiencing a man’s memories, which like physical film stock are subtly (or substantially) altered each time we remove them from storage and reexamine them. It’s a happy marriage of form and content, in a film that’s wonderfully insightful about how emotions like grief and love can elongate time or compress it, or collapse it altogether.

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All of Us Strangers (R, 105 minutes) opens at area theaters today, Jan. 5.