All of Us Strangers Review
A haunting, gorgeous and heartbreaking meditation on love, loss and grief, all told through a fantastical lens where you never quite know what is set to come next.
Adam (Andrew Scott) lives a relatively solitudinous, depressing life. His quiet work on a book is interrupted one evening by seemingly the only other person living in his building; Harry (Paul Mescal). After turning a drunk Harry away one evening, Adam winds up befriending him soon after, and the pair strike up a romantic dalliance. Meanwhile, Adam processes the death decades ago of his parents by visiting their ghosts at his childhood home.
All of Us Strangers, directed by Andrew Haigh, is the sort of movie where not everything is quite as it seems. From very early on in this piece, you get the sense that you don’t quite know what is happening. And as it sucks you in, you let yourself go - like Adam, adrift on the whims of fate and grief that pull you through the profound emotionality of this story.
Stunningly shot by cinematographer Jamie Ramsay, the movie is a true work of art. Ramsay does a wonderful job of blending the orange and teal, neon-inspired apartment complex of Harry and Adam, with the warmth and light of the parents' historical abode.
Andrew Scott gives a wonderfully nuanced performance as Adam. He’s all calm quietude, sort of floating through the solitary existence he calls a life. Mescal is suitably charmant, mysterious, cool and aloof. The romance between the pair of them is lovely and real and beautiful; the casualness of their affair underscored by Adam’s only realisations around his propensity to love. The raw, healing nature of their connection never devolves into anything too romantic, and is all the more powerful for it.
The film twists and turns through the fantastical lens of its protagonist's delusions. Despite all of the fantasy on display, the movie always has solid footing in the wonderfully small romance between Adam and Harry. No matter how wild it gets, no matter how the footing of reality falls out from under the audience, the connection between these two leads always feels like a tether. Both of their experiences with stigma associated with their sexuality, separated by time and the changing of societal attitudes, but all too similar at their core, bind them. Ultimately, it turns All Of Us Strangers into a wonderful blend of heart and heady fantasy, that turns out to be an absolute masterpiece. A must watch.
