Devastation without manipulation. That’s the miracle pulled off by writer-director Andrew Haigh with All of Us Strangers, his supple adaptation of a novel by Taichi Yamada. A screenwriter at an impasse on his latest project—a semi-autobiographical tale based on his 1980s upbringing in suburban London—gets a creative boost when he travels to his childhood home. Knocking on the door, he finds his late parents—still the ages they were back when they died—unremarkably waiting for him. As Adam, the writer, Andrew Scott has a soft sadness that makes you feel like you shouldn’t look at him too intensely, for fear he might crumble. We learn the root of his melancholy in the earnest conversations he has with his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), in which he reveals to them that he’s queer. In the movie’s most excruciating scene, his father admits he always suspected it, but couldn’t bring himself to say anything when he would hear his son crying in his bedroom. The result is an exquisitely envisioned, retroactive coming-out story, laced with a ghostly tenderness. (Haigh and cinematographer Jamie Ramsay open the film with a dissolve shot that deserves consideration alongside the all-timers.) All this plus a riveting Paul Mescal (Aftersun) as a neighbor with whom Adam begins a potentially life-giving affair.
(12/17/2023)
