All of Us Strangers Is Two Movies Trying to Be One

Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Searchlight Pictures

All of Us Strangers is a dreamy ghost story about a man who takes a commuter train out to the London suburb in which he grew up, and who discovers that his mother and father are there in his childhood home, exactly the same age as they were when they were killed in a car accident when he was 11. But even before he reconnects with his dead parents, Adam (Andrew Scott) has been drifting through a half-life himself. He lives in a condo building that’s so new, he appears to be one of only two residents who’ve moved into its anonymous, hotel-like confines so far. He’s a screenwriter who spends his days alone, working and avoiding working by falling asleep on his sofa with snacks and reality TV and waking to find the sun has set, a habit that, more often than not, leaves him still wide awake when the sun rises again. His friends have left the city for more child-friendly climes, and he doesn’t appear to be on any apps. He doesn’t exist in the world so much as he seems to be hovering above it, and when Harry (Paul Mescal), his only neighbor, makes a drunken bid for his company one night, he seems shocked to find someone else on his enclosed plane.

All of Us Strangers, which was directed by Andrew Haigh and adapted from Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel, Strangers, is two movies trying to be one movie. The first and better of the pair is the story of how Adam, through a means unknown that does not appear to surprise anyone involved, is able as a middle-aged man to spend time with the parents who never saw him grow up. This unspeakably bittersweet fantasy is fueled by terrific performances from Jamie Bell and Claire Foy as Adam’s dad and mom, a working-class couple who’ve been frozen in the ’80s at an age younger than their son is now. Bell is mustachioed and masculine, and Foy is fretful and warm, and they give a depth to characters with of-their-era prejudices and personal limitations who nevertheless love Adam enormously. Adam, in turn, displays the self-knowledge of an adult as well as the vulnerability of someone essentially returned to childhood, and the delicacy with which the film handles his coming out to them enables its finest moment. When he and his father talk about how Adam used to cry in his room after being bullied at school, the conversation takes turns that are brutal, then surprising, and then filled with such rueful generosity that it’s impossible not to join the two men in their tears. Adam was, in some ways, stunted by the loss of these two people, and his series of impossible visits with them offers him a chance at resolution even as it seems to exact a physical toll.

The less successful film lurking in All of Us Strangers is about the romance between Adam and Harry that blossoms mostly within the confines of Adam’s home, beginning with a sultry pot-fueled hookup and then progressing into the kind of emotional intimacy that Adam’s never really had in his life until this point. This unfolds in parallel with Adam’s visits home, and is clearly meant to be enabled by them, but instead feels reverse engineered to reflect how he’s changing rather than like anything organic. There’s a potential explanation for this artificiality in the ending, which includes a development I’ve found so maddening that my mind has attempted to block it out as soon as the credits rolled both times I’ve watched the film. But the love story is also, deliberately or not, as exasperatingly airless as Adam’s apartment, with its huge windows that have been locked shut to prevent people from jumping. Adam is in his late 40s, Harry is obviously younger, and while they share a certain loneliness (“Are you often single?� Harry asks him, adding that he is, too, though “not for want of trying�), the film has trouble bringing Harry and the contours of his own melancholy into focus. Adam’s formative experiences, as shaped by the loss of his folks and the rampant homophobia he faced as a child and his fear of AIDS as a young adult, are so dominant that there’s no space to consider the experiences of someone from another generation.

There’s an admirable defiance to Haigh’s interest in characters who aren’t easy in their own sexual identities, who don’t feel in sync with queer culture, and who struggle with scars from the past and internalized shame that doesn’t go away just because it’s unreasonable. Patrick (Jonathan Groff), the protagonist of Looking, the HBO series Haigh produced and frequently directed, is a ball of hangups and bursts of prudishness despite living in the gay mecca of San Francisco. Russell, the lifeguard played by Tom Cullen in Haigh’s outstanding Weekend, is out to his straight friend group but compartmentalizes the romantic and sexual aspects of his life away, confessing to his bolder lover Glen (Chris New) that he feels self-conscious about being gay. (All of Us Strangers often feels like a glossier remix of Weekend, down to Glen playing the role of the dad Russell never knew so that Russell can tell him he’s gay.) Adam is their sibling in discomfort, but in All of Us Strangers, the world is so claustrophobically warped to fit the specifics of Adam’s unhappiness, as if it’s trying to justify his solitude. I started hoping for a reveal that what we’ve been watching is the script Adam was writing. “They say it’s a very lonely kind of life,� his mother says to him after he comes out to her. He replies that, if he is lonely, it’s not because he’s gay, but he doesn’t seem to believe it. Or maybe he doesn’t want to believe it, because if the two things are one and the same, then there’s no point in trying to change.