All of Us Strangers

Part of my coverage of the 59th Chicago International Film Festival.

ALL OF US STRANGERS   ***

Andrew Haigh

2023

IDEA:  Living a solitary existence in a nearly empty apartment complex in London, a gay screenwriter journeys back home to the suburbs and finds his parents, who died many decades earlier, still alive as their past selves.

BLURB:  The adage “you can never go home again” is given a heartrending twist in Andrew Haigh’s latest intimate study in loneliness, otherness, and family trauma. Returning to the LGBTQ themes of his breakout feature, Weekend, the film dramatizes a complex melancholy particular to a gay man of a certain age: namely, the sense of lost time and possibility, of experiences that never happened because a society averse to your identity got in the way. These lost experiences - coming out to family, being in love, being loved - are figured in All of Us Strangers as spectral things that can only be conjured through storytelling imagination. It’s through his autofictional screenwriting, Haigh suggests, that Adam (a superb Andrew Scott) is able to commune with his deceased parents, to fill them in on what’s happened since their tragic deaths and retcon the things that maybe should have happened when they were still alive. Haigh goes directly for the tear ducts in the conversations between Adam and his parents, preserved in his memory as their 30-something selves, basking in a golden glow; the scenario flirts with the maudlin, especially in the film’s later, weepier stages, but seeing it acted out in such affectionate detail is undeniably cathartic. In its mournful depiction of a gay man’s limbo between a traumatic, uprooted past and a seeming void of a future, All of Us Strangers sometimes recalls the work of the late great Terence Davies, down to the use of musical motifs, dreamlike dissolves, and visual reflections. But it is ultimately more hopeful than that, thanks in part to Paul Mescal’s Harry, who shows Adam a way to survive through love and kinship. Haigh can’t exactly avoid the corniness of that notion, but he leans into it with disarming earnestness, unabashedly blasting Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “The Power of Love” like a clarion call and anthem for the dejected.