Andrew Haigh’s newest film, All of Us Strangers (2023) is a passionate and powerful hymn to love triumphant – and a visually stunning story about the inescapable loneliness of human life.

Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Paul Mescal) in Andrew Haigh’s *All of Us Strangers* (2023). Photo/Copyright: © 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

Acclaimed by critics (96% score on Rotten Tomatoes, 7.9 score on IMDb), All of Us Strangers is, undoubtedly, one of the best films of the winter of 2024. In his fifth feature, Andrew Haigh explores the themes that he has been occupied with since the very beginning of his career. Queerness, love, and the need for connection are a direct line to Weekend (2011), one of the most iconic films for the LGBTQ+ community. The past’s shaping of the present, the effects it can have on an overall serene relationship are an echo to 45 years (2015), a touching story about an old couple forced to deal with their ghosts.

Ghosts of the past are exactly what Adam (Andrew Scott), a middle-aged screenwriter living alone in London, faces in this film. His parents (Jamie Bell, Claire Foy) died when he was twelve years old – and yet in the present he somehow visits them, desperately trying to heal the traumas they inadvertently bestowed on him.

Adam (Andrew Scott) in All of Us Strangers (2023). Photo/Copyright: © 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

There seems to be a connection between Adam and Haigh who is not only the director of All of Us Strangers but also the screenwriter. The script (that brought Haigh the nominations for BAFTA and Critics Choice Awards) is loosely based on a 1987 novel by a Japanese writer Taichi Yamada called Strangers, or, literally, Summer of the Strange People. The book is a horror story about a man who meets his dead parents one day and starts visiting them, all the while his mind is slowly deteriorating. In 1988, it was adapted to screen by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi – his The Discarnates is a gentle, dramatic picture in which the visions of dead parents the protagonist gets are phantasmagorical: he literally sees ghosts.

In All of Us Strangers, the cinematography by Jamie Ramsay (also behind the Oscar-nominated Living, 2022), coupled with the smooth editing by Jonathan Alberts (has already worked with Haigh on 45 years), is much more nuanced, with lights and colors creating a somewhat liminal, in-between space where the objective reality somehow co-exists with the surreal. Nevertheless, every conversation Adam has with his dead parents is agonizingly real.

— They say it’s a very lonely kind of life, the mother says.
— They don’t actually say that anymore, the son replies.

In this brief but poignant coming-out scene Scott’s acting is outright genius (hence BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations). He is a fully grown adult and yet a small child, both of them trapped in his loneliness. The feeling of strangeness, foreignness even to your own family, and a yearning for connection is deeply personal not only for the actor and the director, both of them queer artists, – but also for every member of the audience, queer or not. For who has never wanted to be recognized and appreciated for who they are by their parents?

Adam’s mother (Claire Foy) and Adam (Andrew Scott) in *All of Us Strangers* (2023). Photo/Copyright: © 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

The film is set in England in the early 2020s, but there is a connection to the 1980s – the time of Adam’s childhood. The music, the books, the clothes, the hairstyles, the photographs – everything in Adam’s home is from this life that he once had, exactly as he remembers it. The 1980s setting is not cliché, though, but peaceful, grounded. And it is both perfect and imperfect, this space between the real and the surreal, because even though Adam loves his dead family and desperately needs to have a connection with them, they have traumatized him in so many ways. And not intentionally, not really – it is just the way they were, the way the world was in the 1980s. Does not excuse anything – but somehow helps to understand.

Adam’s love interest in the film, a scruffy and confident Harry (Paul Mescal), can certainly relate to the complex brutalizing and loving force of family. The two meet in an empty highrise, the first tenants in the newly constructed apartment building. If Adam exists between two spaces, this highrise and his childhood home, then Harry belongs fully to this lonely tower. The film crew scouted numerous locations in London for a perfect location but ended up building their own set with LED walls on which the cityscapes were depicted. All of it to get the perfect lighting and coloring, to create the ambience of a lonely yet comfortable space where two queer men meet and fall deeply in love. Soft purple, blue, red, orange, green – very earthy colors surround them, and the emotional score by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch (Living, 2022) only amplifies the intensity of their feelings.

Harry (Paul Mescal) in *All of Us Strangers* (2023). Photo/Copyright: © 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

As the love story between Adam and Harry develops, both are forced to deal in their own ways with their loneliness – that is described in the film as a tight, near-permanent knot in the chest. The chemistry between Scott and Mescal is palpable, both actors admitting that they connected instantly. With just four characters to interact with each other (Adam, Harry, and Adams’s parents), there is an incredible intimacy, quietness, and tenderness to All of Us Strangers. It is not crowded. And it is often silent. As such a film should be, perhaps. A film about love triumphant, triumphant over time, space, and death – love of and for parents, love of couples, love of one’s self. Whether it can actually defeat the never-ending loneliness… There is no definitive answer in the film – as there never is in life.

‘All of Us Strangers’ – a relatable drama about the universality of loneliness and love