All of Us Strangers – a moving meditation on relationships

Adam is a middle-aged screenwriter living on his own in an almost-deserted new tower block in London, from where he can gaze down and across the city, a reflection of his lifelong loneliness.

Struggling with his latest project, he becomes aware of another resident on a lower floor. When Harry turns up at his door, drunk, with a bottle of Japanese whisky, and propositions him, Adam is quick to rebuff.

The next day, he takes a train and visits the home where he lived until he was 12, when his parents died in a car crash. There he finds it completely unchanged – and his parents are living there, frozen at the ages they were when they died.

Between increasingly frequent visits, as his parents get to know their adult son, Adam begins a relationship with Harry, where they share not only sex, but a tentative exploration of their emotions and fears.

Director and screenwriter Andrew Haigh’s feted film is based on the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada and is a quiet and very still meditation not only on grief, but also isolation and the fear of rejection within all our relationships.

Inevitably, given that Adam and Harry are gay – as is Haigh himself – the issue of coming out and acceptance (or lack) of being LGBT is a central part of this meditation and the script allows for an exploration of changing attitudes toward sexuality, from the time when Adam’s parents were alive to the present day (including generational differences of using gay’ or ‘queer’ to self-describe).

Weighing in with the look back to the 1980s is the use of pop hits from Adam’s childhood – Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s The Power of Love is an absolute needle drop here – but the likes of Alison Moyet and The Pet Shop Boys are further musical pleasures that also work as a musical counterpoint to the bitterness of an era of Section 28 and the Aids panic.

Jamie D Ramsey’s cinematography adds a sense of unreality to this unconventional ghost story with his use of soft focus in places throughout.

Beautifully paced, this is a four-hander, with Andrew Scott in superb form as Adam, his silences every bit as effective as his words.

Paul Mescal as Harry is in fine form, revealing the character’s vulnerability and tenderness.

Jamie Bell and Claire Foy are wonderful as Adam’s parents, in tricky roles that could have been clunky stereotypes reflecting those ’80s attitudes.

The central pairing raises some interesting questions about current conversations on casting: should only actors who understand the ‘lived reality’ be cast as, say, LGBT, disabled or some ethnic characters?

Here, Scott is gay, but Pascal is not. If you go down that route, would it logically follow that, for example, Dev Patel should not have played David Copperfield? I’ll leave that with you.

In the meantime, All of Us Strangers is a very moving and thought-provoking film that never descends into sentimentality or simplistic tropes. And perfect for LGBT+ History Month.