All of Us Strangers
In selected cinemas
It’s difficult to know where to begin assessing Andrew Haigh’s adaptation of Taichi Yamada’s acclaimed 1987 novel Strangers. Its vibrant pre-release marketing - complete with the Pet Shop Boys’ pulsating cover of ‘Always on My Mind’ and the promise of a love affair between perennial internet thirst traps Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal - alluded to an altogether different film to the one we get, with All of Us Strangers being a far more melancholy affair than one would rightly or wrongly expect it to be.
The film is best categorised as a ghost story, it being centred on Adam (Scott), a lonely screenwriter who resides in a near-empty tower block in London and is disconsolate with grief for his parents, who died in a car crash when he was merely 12-years old. However, a chance encounter with Harry (Mescal) seemingly breaks Adam out of his stupor and encourages him to wrestle with the phantoms of his past.
There are aspects of Haigh’s film which work better than others. Scott is compelling in a lead role which draws upon the writer-director’s own experience as a gay man growing up in 1980s Britain, an undertaking which contrasts subtly but, in some instances, very specifically with the formative years of the younger, but no less troubled, Harry. Jamie D. Ramsay’s cinematography is also visually arresting, particularly during the film’s nightclub scenes, and Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s score remains suitably haunting throughout.
However, the tendency of Haigh’s screenplay to straddle the line between fantasy and reality has a frustrating tendency to lessen the film’s emotional stakes, especially as Andrew’s narrative arc never burrows any deeper than his grief, nor does it adequately explore the everyday consequences of it. While I concede that mourning is a deeply subjective experience, this depiction felt unconvincing for the most part and lost almost all resonance by the time of the final encounter between Andrew and his parents (played effectively by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), which I found to be an overly simplistic, and thus unrealistic, portrayal of closure. Mescal, through no fault of his own, is also overshadowed in a role that tends to rely more on his physical qualities than his undoubted dramatic abilities, a misfortune that makes the film’s twist ending less impactful than it otherwise might have been.
Still, the more powerful elements of All of Us Strangers generally combine to overpower its shortcomings, and the personal nature of its tone will doubtlessly ensure it strikes a chord with many viewers.
