Whether it's conscious or not, we are all in constant dialogue with those who came before us, specifically our parents. Sometimes those conversations are satisfyingly fluid, changing as you grow up and the people around you adjust to the changing world around them. Sometimes those conversations are crystallized and kept within a snowglobe of a memory, something you think about again and again while knowing that the outcome wasn’t what you had hoped for, either because you didn’t know how to word things better or the people you were talking to weren’t quite who you hoped they were.
All Of Us Strangers explores this, allowing the central character (Adam, played by Andrew Scott) to process his memories and longing for conversations he never had with his dead parents (played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) by allowing him to meet them at the age they were when they died. There’s no explanation for this, and everyone decides against overthinking it, but the chance is there for everyone to have a kind of closure that reality denied them decades ago. Meanwhile, Adam also meets a young man named Harry (Paul Mescal), someone he starts growing very close to after initially refusing his awkward attempt to enter his life.
Director Andrew Haigh has been helming great films for quite some time now, but I am tempted to hail All Of Us Strangers as his masterpiece. Based on a novel by Taichi Yamada (this isn’t the first time it has been adapted for the screen), Haigh uses the supernatural framework to look at different kinds of love, different regrets, and how people might change their lives if they realised the butterfly effect caused by many of their actions. He also crafts a delicate love story between Adam and Harry that reminds every viewer of the kind of connection we want with those we care about.
The central quartet are all quite flawless. Foy and Bell play their parts well, young enough to be open and just old enough to have some insight and wisdom (possibly, bear in mind that they might just be projections), even while their view of their son is being reframed. Mescal is a sweet and welcome presence, an apparent chance of very real hope and happiness in the here and now. Then you have Scott, a man who has found a delicate gift he doesn’t understand, but doesn’t want to mishandle or break. Scott goes through a full range of emotions here, and Haigh knows how to complement the insightful and warm script with moments that just show everything via Scott’s face. The man can deliver dialogue brilliantly, but he also knows how to often say everything without saying anything.
There’s great use of a few classic pop hits, a visual style that mixes the everyday with heightened moments that celebrate a life suddenly buoyed by love, and a potentially-divisive ending so heart-achingly beautiful that it moved me to tears as the credits started to roll and I realised that this was going to be an early contender for one of my favourite films of the year.
9/10
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That sounds good. I'll have to watch it when it starts streaming.
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