Andrew Haigh’s heart-wrenching All of Us Strangers is a film about loneliness, familial trauma, healing, and yearning for that which is beyond our reach.
The film opens in Adam’s (wonderful Andrew Scott) apartment, with the London sky behind its windows turning a deep blue, the kind of blue only the face of sadness can carry. Adam is a screenwriter. He lives alone, in the upper parts of a grand building that seems to be empty of other people. There, isolated from the rest of the world, as he’s been for most of his life, he spends his days watching TV, listening to old songs, and staring at the skyline with eyes filled with grief and longing, yet comfortable in their solitariness.
Sifting through memories of his childhood and family photographs, which has now become a part of his daily routine, he tries to write about his long-gone parents. But how can you write about someone when you have no idea about the sort of person they’d be today? It’s a struggle, no doubt, that Adam faces every day, especially because he never got to show his parents his true self.
One night, his mysterious neighbor Harry (wonderful Paul Mescal) knocks on his door with a bottle of whiskey in his hand. It quickly becomes obvious, as he tries to convince Adam to let him in his apartment, that he’s already drunk, achingly lonely, and in desperate need of his company. Adam, though feeling much the same, refuses.
A couple of days later, however, they finally get together, and, as their relationship evolves, Adam’s longing for his parents becomes more intense. He takes the train to their family house, bringing himself, every day, to the day when he lost them. But things are different now. His parents are much the same, younger even than he is, but he is no longer a 12-year-old boy. He's a grown man, with a life of his own, however sad, isolated, and lonely might that life be. “They say it’s a very lonely kind of life,” says his mother during a conversation when he tells her that he is gay. “They don’t actually say that anymore,” Adam replies, letting her know that he’s always been lonely, and not because of his sexual orientation. Knowing he was gay from a very young age might not have been easy, but having no one to console him when he was bullied in school, or to hold him when he was suddenly orphaned, has been much more difficult to bear.
These psychological wounds that can surely, not only mark a person’s development, but steer its direction, can shed some light on the reasons for Adam’s loneliness, and why, that first night when Harry appeared on his doorstep, he didn’t let him in. Having Harry to be vulnerable with and to take care of him, however, ultimately allows Adam to face his pain while being loved and supported, and though this is extremely important while working through trauma, he still must do the work himself.
Trauma is a fascinating thing - it’s like a ghost that lives alongside us, haunting the air we breathe, the space we inhabit in the world, and the relationships we choose or don’t allow ourselves to have. It is the thing that anchors us in the past, while we reach, aimlessly, for the future.
In Haigh’s All of Us Strangers (based on the Japanese writer Taichi Yamada’s spare novel “Strangers”), time is fluid. It bends, breaks, and flows constantly between Adam’s present and his dreams of a different past. But the past cannot be changed. It can only be accepted, and acceptance can be a painful, heart-shattering thing.
Visually stunning, with shots that beautifully portray feelings of love, longing, and loneliness, and a story that reaches deep down into the soul of the viewer, All of Us Strangers is not an easy film to watch.
But what truly beautiful thing is?
Watch All of Us Strangers now on the Criterion Channel.
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