This piece contains spoilers about All of Us Strangers, including its ending.
Early in All of Us Strangers, Adam, the solitary screenwriter played by Andrew Scott, finds himself watching Top of the Pops after returning from a nighttime fire drill in his oddly underpopulated London high-rise. Right as the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood begins a performance of their 1984 hit “The Power of Love,†Adam hears a knock. Harry (Paul Mescal), a handsome neighbor he’d glimpsed through a window, has shown up with a half-empty bottle of expensive Japanese whiskey and a request for Adam’s company. “There’s vampires at my door,†Harry sighs, paraphrasing one of the song’s opening lines. Adam turns him away.
These are the first of several references to “The Power of Love†in All of Us Strangers. On close examination, the ballad unlocks some of Andrew Haigh’s elliptical new drama. As Adam drifts further into the movie’s metaphysical dream logic, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s song becomes a touchstone uniting the past, present, and future. It’s both earnest and ethereal, a grand reverie about romance that parallels Adam’s emotional hazards. “Purge the soul / Make love your goal,†front man Holly Johnson commands on the chorus.
When Haigh first started writing the film, he knew almost immediately that he wanted to use “The Power of Love†as its closing number. It was part of a playlist he made that comprised the Smiths, Pet Shop Boys, Fine Young Cannibals, Blur, and other acts that soundtracked Haigh’s youth in the ’80s and ’90s. He put a few of those hallmarks, including the Frankie song, directly into the script. Soon, he couldn’t imagine Strangers ending any other way, which is also how he felt about the Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes†at the close of 45 Years.
“It spoke so much to my longing as a young teen wanting some kind of love that was queer love but felt very, very much out of reach,†Haigh says of listening to “The Power of Love†as a music-obsessed kid in the United Kingdom. “That’s why I loved that song, and so when I was making this film, I thought, I want that to be the crescendo of the film, because that is the thing that Adam has found or has understood that he can find or will go on to find again — however you might want to read the ending.â€
As Adam curls up beside Harry in the final shot, he recites the first two lines of “The Power of Love†into Harry’s ear: “I’ll protect you from the hooded claw / Keep the vampires from your door.†By then, Adam has abandoned the figurative portal that allows him to commune with his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), who died in a car crash when he was 12. He’d like to keep visiting his childhood home, where he discovers them somehow frozen in time, but they eventually insist he not return, lest Adam spend the rest of his days languishing in the grief of their absence. Moving on from the fantasy of his parents’ resurrection allows him to embrace Harry, the swoony admirer he was still too bereft to think he’d find. But it’s too late: Harry, the film reveals, drank himself to death after Adam declined to invite him in. “I was so scared that night. I just needed to not be alone,†a ghostly Harry says. The vampires he referenced at Adam’s door weren’t so abstract after all. When the camera pans up from Harry and Adam lying in bed one last time, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s soaring synths surge. The pair fade into a pool of light that evokes the beginning of the “Power of Love†music video.
Throughout All of Us Strangers, “The Power of Love†emerges as a sort of anchor point. During Adam’s second trip home, he leafs through a pile of vinyl records in his old bedroom, lingering on a copy of Welcome to the Pleasuredome, the Frankie Goes to Hollywood album that features the song. Later, once Adam and Harry’s relationship has bloomed, they’re seen watching the same Top of the Pops clip that Adam was drawn to at the film’s kickoff. Haigh originally wanted to open with Adam watching Hellraiser, the erotic 1987 horror movie noted for its queer subtext. When he couldn’t get the rights, Haigh subbed in the “Power of Love†performance, treating the track as a bookend to Harry and Adam’s bond.
“When Frankie came out, it basically was at the same time that I was starting to understand that I was queer,†Haigh says. “They were insanely subversive for that moment in the early ’80s. From an adult perspective, you can look back and go, I understand what that song was saying to me, emotionally, politically, whatever it might be.â€
Frankie Goes to Hollywood burned fast and bright, then disappeared. Johnson and vocalist Paul Rutherford, who got their starts playing in Liverpool pubs, were openly gay at a time when few pop stars dared to acknowledge any sexual expression that deviated from the mainstream. The band wore ornate costumes, including leather gear, and set the heady video for Frankie’s 1983 electro-rock smash “Relax†inside a gay fetish club. As the song climbed the British and American charts, the BBC banned it, citing “unsuitable†content. Here was an unabashedly queer quintet with progressive antiwar leanings lighting up the pop landscape in the days of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. (Check out Johnson arguing about the “Relax†prohibition with a BBC producer on an early-’80s music show.)
“We just were provocative, and we didn’t think there was any harm in it, to be honest,†Rutherford says. “It was meant to be as honest as we could possibly be. That’s what we were doing as two little gay boys in front with straight musicians behind. It just made sense. We never cared. We’d been chased through Liverpool for being gay for years and years. You kind of got used to it. Then we used it: ‘Yeah, that’s who we are. It’s cool.’ And it worked.â€
Frankie Goes to Hollywood rode the pre-Britpop wave through 1985, collecting Grammy and MTV Video Music Award nominations along the way. “The Power of Love†was their third consecutive No. 1 single in the U.K. But behind the scenes, things fell apart. Trevor Horn, the producer who signed Frankie to his ZTT Records, wielded a heavy hand, and relations among the band members fractured. “It was too much too soon,†Rutherford recalls. The group’s second album, 1986’s Liverpool, came and went without a hit single that matched the highs of “Relax†or “The Pleasure of Love.†The following year, Johnson sued ZTT over a contract dispute and won. The original Frankie lineup didn’t perform again until 2023, when they reunited at Eurovision.
At first glance, “The Pleasure of Love†is fairly tame, at least by Frankie Goes to Hollywood standards. A heartfelt aria about romance’s redemptive force doesn’t scream controversy. But Frankie found a way to make the project a bit cheeky. The music video depicted a Christmas nativity come to life, and Johnson wore what looked like a cross between a priest’s cassock and a boxer’s robe during that Top of the Pops appearance. Attaching religious iconography to the idea of gay devotion proved that Frankie could give even a middle-of-the-road ballad an inflammatory bent.
“I always felt like ‘The Power of Love’ was the record that would save me in this life,†Johnson once said. “There is a biblical aspect to its spirituality and passion — the fact that love is the only thing that matters in the end.â€
Love is certainly the only thing that matters at the end of All of Us Strangers. Adam may have missed his opportunity with Harry because he was too haunted by his past — perhaps the whole affair was a figment of his imagination — but that doesn’t mean he’ll be alone forever. A cynical reading of the movie might dwell on Harry’s death as a sign that queer life is alienating, especially when coupled with childhood wounds. Interpreted more generously, Adam finally understands that he has turned the people he’s lost into phantoms and is forever stalked by their memory. The next time someone like Harry comes knocking, maybe he’ll let him in.
Music supervisor Connie Farr secured the rights to “The Power of Love†as soon as she read Haigh’s script, so no one had to worry that the song could be unavailable. He played it on the set while Scott and Mescal shot the final scene, restarting it with each take. It became integral to the story’s DNA, much like the song was to Haigh’s adolescence.
“The idea that I used to love that song as an 11-year-old queer kid living in suburban England and that I could put it in a film years and years later, now being very open about my sexuality, is something I never thought would actually be a possibility,†Haigh says. “And I can make a film with queer content — again, something I never thought would be a possibility. And I’m in a relationship, which is, again, something I never thought would be a possibility. I was like, Fuck it, that’s going at the end of the film. There was no way I was not doing that. I wouldn’t even care if nobody liked it.â€