All Of Us Strangers (15)

Fortysomething screenwriter Adam lives alone on an upper floor of a recently constructed London apartment building, wrestling with a creative block as he attempts to channel childhood memories into words on his laptop screen. Out of curiosity, Adam visits his childhood home in Sanderstead, south of Croydon. Miraculously, he discovers the ghosts of his parents linger at the property and Adam has a chance to reconnect with the people taken from him just before he turned 12.

LondonNet Film Review

All Of Us Strangers (15) Film Review from LondonNet

Being human is messy. Never more so when our most deeply rooted fear, the death of someone we love, forever alters the ebb and flow of daily life and forces us to confront our fragile mortality in a haze of grief, anger and regret. Based on the novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, writer-director Andrew Haigh’s achingly beautiful ghost story imagines that maelstrom of conflicting emotions when a 45-year-old man magically reconnects with his late parents, who died in a car crash just before he was 12. Benevolent spectres are frozen in time in 1987 and the central character reverts to a boyish trepidation in their presence, nervously navigating the subject of his sexuality when their frame of reference is a groundswell of bigotry and intolerance in response to the Aids/HIV crisis under Margaret Thatcher’s government…

Andrew Scott is sensational as a loner, who begins to dismantle seemingly unscalable emotional barricades following that devastating loss in adolescence. Haigh’s exquisite screenwriting shines in heartbreaking scenes with phantasmagorical parents, played with tenderness by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, like when the father belatedly apologises for not comforting his boy during a period of bullying at school: “I’m sorry I never came into your room when I heard you crying.” On-screen chemistry between Scott and Paul Mescal is molten and Haigh choreographs their sex scenes with artful sensitivity.

Fortysomething screenwriter Adam (Scott) lives alone on an upper floor of a recently constructed London apartment building, wrestling with a creative block as he attempts to channel childhood memories into words on his laptop screen. His unedifying seclusion of half-eaten takeaways and late-night television is interrupted by a knock at the door.

Harry (Mescal), who lives on the sixth floor and is desperate for companionship, sways drunkenly in the corridor. “We don’t have to do anything if I’m not your type,” he smiles, hoping to be let in. Adam initially rebuffs Harry but the two men subsequently spark a tender romance which coincides with the screenwriter visiting his childhood home in Sanderstead, south of Croydon. Miraculously, Adam discovers the ghosts of his parents (Bell, Foy) linger at the property.

All Of Us Strangers is essentially a four-hander between Scott, Mescal, Bell and Foy and each member of cast is wondrous. I was almost the same age as Adam in 1987 so a heady scent of nostalgia pervades every frame, crescendo-ing with the Pet Shop Boys’ version of Always On My Mind as the reunited family decorates a Christmas tree. It may be foolish, in January, to anoint Haigh’s haunting picture my favourite film of 2024 but it is hard to imagine another feature moving me so profoundly over the next 12 months. I look forward to be proven wrong.

– Jo Planter