In a homage to his own past, perhaps for writer's inspiration, Adam takes a train back to his childhood hometown. There he meets his parents, the ones who died in a car accident when he was ten. They recognise him and ask him in. After a pleasant evening of catching up he returns to his London flat and, emboldened by his experience, finds Harry and they let each other in.
Adam enjoys the intimacy with Harry as someone who has done without love for too long and it drives him to return to his parents in their home on the border of mortality and grief. Adam comes out to his mother who, though young in appearance struggles to conceal her 1980s panic. Later, his father is begrudgingly accepting. Later still, you know where this is going. Except you don't.
It reminds me of an affectation I have whenever I see an old tv. It might be a portable or an old furniture-scaled box with a bulging screen and a numbered dial for the stations (including the never used 5A). These might be part of a retro-style display at someone's place or part of the cute decor in a cafe but the effect on me is always the same: I want to be able to switch it on and watch old television. Not just the shows but the news and the commercials. There's an ache that comes with this but it's not just nostalgia, it's more of a cry of frustration. Somewhere between the goopy old fashions and the darker iterations of dodgy values comedy that would sour any fond recollection, there's a chance to grab the missteps and interpersonal atrocities and smooth their spiky edges into harmony. That's what I was feeling when I watched this intricate and mesmerising film. Adam's loneliness and grief have him building monsters and heroes even when everyone looks and sounds normal, when everything just keeps looking beautiful. There's a scene near the climax that might start taking you out of the film but I'd advise you to just hang on and let it do its work. It's worth it.
There are only four speaking parts in this film and each is given crucial material for the construction of the whole. Claire Foy and Jamie Bell are the parents, conveying the difficult status of being both past and present at once, awestruck at their own appearance but with clearly delineated characters continuing through the lost years. Paul Mescal's Harry gets us to the danger point between a yearning attraction and recklessness. But the weight of the film is on Andrew Scott's shoulders. It is an intense performance of a character whose action almost entirely takes place inside his skull, but Scott builds this from the gravity of his portrayal of constant, endless loneliness. Like the distorted image he hallucinates of his childhood self with a head warped by reflection into a Francis Bacon scream, he demands our unfaltering attention. We grab at moments of levity and warmth like crumbs, knowing that we will soon return to his swollen base of pain. That might not read as a great recommendation for anyone seeking a cosy escape into whimsy but the richness of it will soon have you keeping up.
All of Us Strangers fills a need to examine grief and how addictive it is. That it does so with such expertly drawn interplay between characters in pain of loneliness and others racked by fear of their own place in the time that must leave them behind in the universe is a credit to Andrew Haigh's writing and direction and brings him to a peak in his studies of humanity at an intimate remove. You might think it's not one to see if you're at a low ebb but I can promise without spoilers that the quiet apotheosis in its final moments will lift you.
All of Us Strangers is currently in cinemas.
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