NYFF Review: All of Us Strangers

“It’s a very lonely sort of life,” Claire Foy’s youthful ghoul of a mother says to her son, who clearly eclipses her age of death in their posthumous meetings (undeniably gorgeous as Andrew Scott may be). He, Adam, has just come out to her as gay, and she dishes out all the worrywart talking points of a mother who didn’t get to live to see the first same-sex marriages or the adoption of PrEP as an almost surefire antiviral against HIV. “Things are different now,” Adam says, Scott’s eyes perfectly communicating to us that he doesn’t quite believe his own words. But they are different now, aren’t they? Writer-director Andrew Haigh’s moody, devastating supernatural love story juxtaposes queer past with queer present, muddying the answer in ways that feel as true as they do pessimistic.

All of Us Strangers—loosely based on Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers—takes its time justifying its instantly bleak tone. Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s score hums us into a state of contemplative yet-to-be-defined mourning as Adam stares out windows and moves lethargically through his life. The first fifteen minutes or so aren’t meant to ease you into the film you’re about to watch, they outright tell you: this is going to be a major downer.

But the first act eventually settles into exploring two distinct dynamics in Adam’s life. We’re first introduced to Harry (Paul Mescal), Adam’s drunken and seemingly only neighbor in a nearly empty London residential tower. Eyes drooping and words slurring, Harry propositions Adam with a hookup, to which Adam politely declines. Thereafter, the only paths they cross are each other’s. Their empty, lonely living situations make it feel like they’re moving through purgatory, neither as happy nor as healthy as they could be. Emotionally. Physically. Mentally. Even in Harry’s obtuse advances, there’s recognition in Adam’s eyes. This is a kinship only two queer men could share.

Haigh has also cast two actors who, if they ever chose to do a Marvel movie, would manage to have chemistry with the tennis balls they’d be acting against. Scott and Mescal are magnetic together, resembling a darker, more impressionistic version of Tom Cullen and Chris New’s characters from Haigh’s superior 2011 Weekend. Their flirtation is sexy yet dangerous, ensuring we’re never quite able to tell whether they’d ruin each other’s lives or stop each other from ruining their lives by themselves, as they are both clearly on track to. Mescal brings the same inner demons of substance abuse to Harry as he brought to last year’s sensational Aftersun (in more ways than one, Harry feels like a spiritual sequel to that film’s Calum, for which Mescal was nominated for Oscar). Don’t worry, the schlubby, modestly gruff charm is there, too. Adam’s demons, however, are apparently more external.

The second dynamic we get to explore with Adam is that which he shares with his ghostly parents (Foy and Jamie Bell), who died in a car crash on Christmas thirty some years ago. Whenever he visits his childhood home outside London, the lights are on for him. He’s able to tell his parents about his job, his life, and eventually Harry. Them dying when Adam was at such a young age means they never got to have the whole gay discussion, and this is where Haigh’s script excels most.

There’s great catharsis for queer audiences in the sequences Adam spends with his parents. Scott does a tremendous job showing Adam’s bubbling anger suppressed under the joy of merely getting to see his parents again. As Harry tells him of his own experience “drifting to the edge” of his own family, Adam dives back in headfirst to something we’re never really sure is actually there. His father is initially more accepting than his mother, but there is still a reconciliation that must happen between them all for Adam to feel satisfied (Foy is especially impressive, packing a ton of character defining detail into her limited screentime). “I have good memories, too,” Adam tells his father after a particularly tough conversation. And the more determined he gets to make more good memories, the more his maturity, and potentially sanity, regresses.

Haigh’s direction as All of Us Strangers dabbles in surrealism is the perfect combination of over- and understated. There’s a sequence toward the end of act two that balances absurdist comedy with nightmare fuel that might just scare the dime bags out of circuit gays’ cross-body bags, showing impressive range from a director typically known better for his grounded, slice-of-life approach.

But as the film nears its resolution, it heads into expressions more simplistic than the complexities that came before. Final conversations and twists feel a little too easy and even rushed. Suddenly lacking in subtlety, the script goes for some blunt instruments to elicit tears. It only partially works.

Most surprising, however, is the punishing quality the film takes on by the end that feels unearned and unsatisfying. Somehow, even Weekend, a more pessimistic and conclusive riff on Before Sunrise, feels more hopeful than All of Us Strangers. But then, the tides are shifting again, in the exact opposite direction they were in 2011. Has the slowing of progress re-damned us as queer people? Has too little changed over the past 30 years that the best we can do is live with ghosts? Maybe holding onto our loved ones beyond our means, and theirs, isn’t just the stuff of campfire stories anymore. Or maybe Haigh’s own hurt doesn’t have to be a universal truth. As has too long been the case for queer audiences that are just now getting the stories they deserve, this one among them flaws and all, the jury is disappointingly still out.