The lonely life of suburbia is catnip for filmmakers, but life in urban apartments—particularly new, soundproof buildings—can be just as isolating, perhaps even more so. High up in a box in the sky, it's easy to imagine being the last person on earth.
This is the kind of apartment that Adam (Andrew Scott), the dreamer at the center of All of Us Strangers, chose to live in on the outskirts of London. Alone, desperately trying to write a script and wearing a deeply ugly sweater. Most of the time he lies on the couch, watches TV and eats chips. He can stare at the skyline from his window. But he is completely disconnected from the city, just as he has felt disconnected from everything his entire life. One gets the feeling that now, in early middle age, he is at his most outwardly secure. Adam is gay; his childhood was tragic; He's a writer, the kind of person his father always said knew less about the world than anyone else. Loneliness is a given for him.
“All of Us Strangers,” written and directed by Andrew Haigh, is loosely based on Japanese writer Taichi Yamada’s surrogate novel “Strangers,” about a divorced writer who meets a woman in his building. But Haigh's works (including “Weekend” and the television series “Looking”) have often explored the intimate emotional landscape of queer men, and he recast Yamada's story into something less cold, much raunchier, much closer to his own heartbeat.
Haigh spends the first half hour making us wonder what kind of film we are even watching. There are moments when it seems as if Adam is not just figuratively but actually the last man on earth. But one night he meets Harry (Paul Mescal, with a moustache) who knocks on his door with a whiskey bottle in his hand. They are apparently the only two people living in this strange building. Adam is polite but awkward and doesn't let him in. He's comfortable with his loneliness – or too afraid of what disturbing it might mean. But Adam also tries to write about his childhood (“EXT SUBURBAN HOUSE 1987,” he types) and finds himself on a train headed to the suburbs almost without thinking.
Time turns there, folds in on itself, and when he returns to his apartment, his dreary life begins to gain dimension. At first hesitantly, then passionately, he falls in love with Harry and slowly peels away layers of himself that have left scars. Could life be different? Could it be worth the risk to open your heart? And what would his parents say if they could see him now?
Haigh is a deeply lyrical filmmaker, and All of Us Strangers unfolds in a space that seems like a dream or hallucination, where the surging soul rush of love pulsates, transforming a life from monochrome to color. However, it's a film with a tricky conceit that I won't spoil for you. Let's just say it's a spooky tale that's a little contrived in nature and therefore veers close to tacky sentimentality more than once. I watched it surrounded by crying onlookers, struggling to stay focused as I desperately tried to rationally untangle the storylines. On second look, I gave in to it, and that's the right way: just feel through it and let it roll over you.
In the end, it's Scott's performance that makes everything sing. He's an exceptional stage actor, but on screen, where you can see his eyes, he conveys repressed pain without seeming like a cliché. (No offense intended to Mescal – how lucky to have a film with two talented, beautiful, sad-eyed Irishmen – but Scott is the focus here.) At one point he's wearing adult-sized pajamas, as is usually the case at 8 -year-old boy (and I promise it makes more sense in the movie) and somehow manages to evoke vulnerability and innocence rather than hilarious incongruity. Every move he makes and every line he speaks reveals his soul's longing for the impossible: to see his parents, who died when he was 12, once again and learn how they would feel about who he is now.
“All of Us Strangers” acts as a prism through which loneliness and its manifestations are refracted, like colorful light on a wall. Adam is physically, emotionally, mentally and artistically alone, a man detached from almost everyone. But perhaps his greatest sense of loneliness comes from encounters and experiences that could have happened but didn't: the trip he and his parents didn't take, the Christmas trees they didn't trim, the conversations about They didn't guide his sexuality, the comfort his father never gave him when he cried alone in his room as a boy.
If you have suddenly lost a parent or a parent close to you without having the opportunity to say goodbye and tell them everything you were never able to say, then you know how that feels. You spend your life wondering how they would react to you now, to the person you have become, often in part because of their absence. Would you argue about politics? Would you be proud of your achievements? Would they praise you? Or worse, reject you? Without knowing it, we try to summon the dead. We comfort ourselves by imagining that they forgive us and accept us. We live our lives surrounded by spirits.
“I always felt like a stranger in my own family,” Harry tells Adam, and when I was able to stop intellectualizing “All of Us Strangers,” the line hit me like a brick. I think it's a feeling that's more common than most of us admit, even to ourselves, even when we're surrounded by people who love us. We know that we are strangers in our families, in our lives, in our cities, in our own bodies, and our life's work is to move from the strange to something close to the familiar. All of us, I think.
We are all strangers
Rated R for frank (though not graphic) sexual encounters, some drug use, and lots of sad themes. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters.