'All of Us Strangers' (2024, dir. Andrew Haigh) Review

I wrote this review of All of Us Strangers several months ago after the film first came out in cinemas, so I thought I'd share it here. Whilst I usually gravitate towards films with female leads, you can never go wrong with Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal... ever.

A cute little postcard I picked up from the cinema.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Cinemagoers have undoubtedly been held in an emotional chokehold since the release of All of Us Strangers. With its combination of euphoric highs (quite literally, Adam and Harry take drugs together on a night out) and gut-wrenching lows, the film is the embodiment of a roller coaster.

The film opens with Adam (Scott), a screenwriter, in his London apartment which we soon learn upon his evacuation during a false fire alarm is almost entirely empty - apart from one other neighbour Adam spots gazing out of his window. Immediately, the film displays a kind of dystopian quality, because why in London would there be an essentially empty tower block?

Adam soon after this meets this other neighbour, Harry (Mescal), when Harry drunkenly knocks on Adam’s door offering to come in and share a drink. We see Adam hesitate and ultimately reject Harry’s offer. From the film’s very beginning, it is hammered home that Adam is isolated and lonely, wrapped up in trying to write a screenplay about his parents whom he lost as a child and eerily meets again during the film in his childhood home. He is a man that comes across as though he is too comfortable, and yet uncomfortable, with being so isolated – an isolation formed by the loss of his parents and by being queer. He wants to break out of it but is too afraid to do so. As the film goes on and he becomes closer to Harry, it is perhaps an indication that all of this is changing for Adam.

The director Andrew Haigh, along with the cinematographer Jamie Ramsay, shoot the love scenes between Adam and Harry so sensitively and delicately, and one aspect that particularly stood out to me was the lack of score that accompanied the initial intimate scenes – it is almost silent to begin with, with just the presence of natural, diegetic sounds. The camera frames their bodies through mid shots and close ups, which make the scenes arguably less titillating, forcing you instead to focus more on the powerful intimacy that is being shared between these two people. At times, we don’t even see them kiss, we just see the way Harry is stroking Adam’s knee.

One other significant aspect of the film is the soundtrack, the two songs Always On My Mind by the Pet Shop Boys and The Power of Love by Frankie Goes to Hollywood being particularly significant. They are so perfectly integrated into the narrative and provide those extra emotional punches that it’s certain you won’t be able to listen to those songs in the same way again. In this instance, a special shoutout has to go to Claire Foy who, playing Adam’s mother as she was in the 80s before she died, is so breathtaking, particularly when she is singing along to Always On My Mind, bringing the upbeat song back to its melancholy roots, as we witness her thought process all on a face that is barely moving; she realises she wasn’t always there for her son in the ways she ought to have been.

For me, the biggest emotional punch comes at the end of the film, when we realise that Harry has been dead all along. We learn that at the film’s beginning, after Adam rejects his offer of a drink, Harry goes back to his flat and later dies, presumably from his alcohol and drug consumption. There are many interpretations we can make from this, one of which could be that throughout the film we have witnessed what could’ve been had Adam said yes to Harry’s drink, but instead he said no because he’s stuck in this cycle of grief and inability to get over his parents’ death. The film’s closing shot is Adam hugging what we believe to be Harry’s ghost on his bed, loudly playing The Power of Love on the record player. The camera zooms out until Adam and Harry become a mere star in the sky. Maybe Adam has been dead all along too? We don’t find out.

After leaving the cinema, I overheard someone say that they found the film “too far-fetched”, but this was the very reason why I loved the film so much. I think as audiences we have come to expect films to be so neatly explained and tied up in order to be understood and therefore enjoyable, so much so that we are seemingly unable to enjoy anything that isn’t entirely comprehendible. All of Us Strangers leaves it up to the audience member to make sense of the film in their own way, which is an effective way to keep them thinking about it, as if the grief the film leaves you with isn’t enough.

And as a last note, Andrew Scott is so unbelievably good in this. He is a marvel and deserves so much praise for his work in this film. In contributing to the discourse on artists snubbed by the Oscars this year, he is certainly one of them.

Image my own.