All of Us Strangers feels like the film Andrew Haigh has been waiting to make. Whether it’s his breakout feature, Weekend, or the HBO series Looking, this director is clearly interested in the idiosyncratic, lonely lives of certain gay men. There is a bittersweetness that comes with so much progress won in such little time. While many men are still reeling from the AIDS crisis and institutional discrimination, a new generation of voters has sprung up that takes gay prom kings and same-sex marriage for granted. All of Us Strangers is at its smartest when bringing these truths to light. It’s a little too polished for such raw subject matter, but this tender film deserves acknowledgement for spotlighting an overlooked – but very real – struggle.
All of Us Strangers may borrow its premise from the 1987 Japanese novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, but it’s a loose adaptation. For maximum delight you should go in knowing as little as possible, but here are the basics: Andrew Scott is Adam, a screenwriter in his 40s just muddling through. His friends have all left London with their partners and children, and he spends his nights watching old TV and downing biscuits. Change presents itself in the form of Harry (Paul Mescal), Adam’s hot neighbor, and a new writing project. But as Adam mines his own youth for material, specters of the past step forward. Literally. Adam begins to spend much of his time with the ghosts of his dead parents, played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, who have manifested in his childhood home.
As he grows close to people — or spirits — again, Adam reflects on the culture that taught him to isolate himself. Too old to call himself “queer” instead of “gay” and too young to have spent much of his adulthood worrying about the AIDS epidemic or Section 28, Adam recounts a life colored by mundane discrimination. A classic “sensitive boy” with no athletic talent, he was alienated by peers and even his own father for not being manly enough.
There were seeds of this in Weekend, where the leads debated the drawbacks of flamboyance and blending in, but it’s satisfying to see things spelled out so clearly. With no cultural roadmap for growing up gay, Adam is stuck in arrested development, standing still in a hollow London high-rise while his friends happily embark on “real life.” His rendezvous with the past only emphasizes that inertia.
I’m not saying All of Us Strangers is a film about how sad it is to be gay – just a realistic one. There’s joy to be found in Adam and Harry’s budding relationship and the funny bumbling of Bell and Foy. Haigh’s signature visuals are almost unbearably pretty, with no golden hour left un-filmed. This film celebrates the good and bad of life rather than lamenting it. That’s mostly a lovely thing.
I say mostly because, well, it should be easy to make a raggedy, sad, bitter gay movie in 2023. And yet All of Us Strangers, Haigh’s first feature with a mainstream awards push – also his first with major distribution, via Disney’s Searchlight Pictures – plays nice. We already know Scott can volley from cynical to romantic on a dime (hello, Hot Priest), but while Adam has plenty of reason to be hard-hearted, he hardly acts it. In fact, the one time he does, the universe delivers him a brass-knuckled dick punch that, sure, makes sense for the plot – but still feels downright mean. Maybe Haigh wanted to make a more pleasant gay movie this go-round, but All of Us Strangers is a film that Glen, the sardonic, in-your-face protagonist of Weekend, would probably sneer at.
The film’s pat niceness is most glaring in its final scenes, as Adam’s story resolves in a way that is both too neat and also not really about Adam anymore. There’s nothing wrong with a gay movie with a broad, existential message, but damn. All of Us Strangers spends most of its runtime generating empathy for a guy who has shut himself off from the world, only to visit horrors upon him when he loosens up. Let a gay indulge.
