All of Us Strangers review: This Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal film will shatter you to pieces

Don’t we all live our lives surrounded by ghosts? Some from the past, most in our heads, and others of those we’ve loved and lost. Andrew Haigh’s new film “All of Us Strangers” is a heartbreaking dirge, a whimsical swig at what could’ve been, the impossible longing to hold on, and undo the cruelty of life.

If you aren’t already in love with Andrew Scott and his unreal ability to make the inexplicable palpable, enough to make you think about his every performance for weeks, through this film, he gives you yet another chance. He is Adam, a solitary gay screenwriter who is one of the first inhabitants of a new high-rise apartment on the outskirts of London. He is trying to write about his childhood when one night, the only other dweller in the building shows up at his door with a bottle of Japanese whiskey and a plea to be allowed in.

He says there are vampires at his door. There’s an agonising anguish to his desperation, an infinite sadness in his eyes, it’s a scream to be saved. “How do you cope?” he asks Adam. This younger, painfully lonely man is Harry (Paul Mescal).

Adam soon finds himself on a train to Croydon, to the old suburban neighbourhood where he grew up. Unsure and with no clear purpose, he roams around his childhood home when he sees his father (Jamie Bell) calling out to him. He takes him home and there he meets his mother (Claire Foy).

His parents are the same age as they were when they got killed in a car crash on Christmas night 30 years ago. Adam was 12 then. This is the first time he has met them as an adult. It’s a time warp. They are a bit younger than he is.

In the course of the next few meetings, he gets to share with them everything that he never could; they were taken away from him too soon, too suddenly. In between all the catching up, he unlocks the closet, the skeletons tumble out, clearing room for some sunlight, and fresh air.

Each scene of Adam with his parents simmers with an aching vulnerability, a painful yearning, a throbbing tenderness. It’s marvellous how Haigh ensures that his parents don’t come across as mere shadows. He fleshes them out with such immaculate detail and earnestness, that he makes them look as real to us as they do to Adam.

Loosely based on the Japanese novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, the film is sparsely populated—few dialogues, and fewer people. The eerie quietness that Harry keeps complaining about pulsates entirely through the 105 minutes, ominous and unsettling, a stark metaphor for both Adam and Harry’s tragic marginalization and acute isolation.

When Adam comes out to his mum, in response to her reaction and mounting fears, he keeps on saying, “Everything is different now.” It made me think of the scene in “Red White and Royal Blue” (2023) when Uma Thurman’s President finds out that her son (played by a distractingly handsome Taylor Zakhar Perez) is bisexual. Though both scenes feature mothers finding out about the queerness of their sons, they couldn’t be more different. Half a century of awareness, struggles, and sacrifices lie in this chasm. So much has changed since the 1980s. And yet, so much woefully remains the same.

Adam wanting to prevent the death of his parents or yearning to stay with them just a little bit longer also reminded of The Time Traveler’s Wife and how, even if you get to experience something as mind-boggling as time travel and be with your beloved dead again, certain rules are stubborn enough to persist, even in the realm of the fantastical. You cannot prevent death, our fabulists seem to warn us over and over, no matter how hard you may try.

The time that Adam and Harry spend in bed not having sex but talking, listening, touching, spooning, sharing the most intimate of intimacies, warmth, feeling safe, and wanted, and at home teleported me to Jordan and Heer from Rockstar (2011) playing between pristine white sheets away from the world and its deafening noise, revelling in stillness, loving and being loved. Isn’t everything that we do an attempt to inch closer to this feeling, find it, and never let it go?

The heart-crushing end is so strongly reminiscent of Aftersun (2022), another glorious Paul Mescal movie, that it is impossible for you to not shatter to pieces. In one crucial scene, Adam asks his mum if it is all real. She answers by posing another question. “Does it feel real?” she asks him. He nods. There you go, she says. I want to add: Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.