All Of Us Strangers (2024)

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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Women Talking (2022)

Written and directed by Sarah Polley, based on a book by Miriam Toews that was based on a real-life incident, Women Talking is the heavy-hitting Best Picture nominee that I was least looking forward to watching. It felt like the subject matter would be too grim, and the presentation of the premise (summed up by the title, it is essentially just women talking for most of the runtime) didn’t cry out to me as something cinematic. But I have been wrong before, and I suspected that Women Talking would be worth the time and emotional investment, even if it wouldn’t be high up on my “best films of 2022” list.

I may have to wait until I one day muster the strength to revisit this, but the obvious “surprise” that I should reveal now is that Women Talking WOULD actually end up on my “best films of 2022” list. It’s an incredible and impressive work, and easily the best directorial work yet from Polley.

I should provide a bit more information about the plot. The setting is a small, isolated, religious community. The women in that community are horrified when it is revealed that many of them have been drugged and raped by the men. They have to gather together to discuss their options. They can stay and do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. And they only have limited time to decide, while the men of the community are away to help the rapists avoid any serious repercussions. The rest of the film shows the women debating two of the three choices, whether to stay or leave, and they are helped in their debate and discussion by one man who is still trustworthy and supportive.

Although showing a horrific situation specific to a certain setting, Women Talking uses the premise to inevitably show the difficulties that face any woman stuck in an abusive situation. The variety of viewpoints, all from women considering their own situations, show the full range of emotions and thoughts that would probably go through the mind of any one woman finding themselves in this awful situation.

The focus is very much on the dialogue here, in terms of both individual lines and exchanges between people of opposing views, and Polley helps herself no end by assembling a cast of talent who all rise to the challenging material. Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, and Judith Ivey (my personal favourite of the nominal leads) are all given at least one moment to metaphorically punch viewers in the gut, Ben Whishaw is very lovely and sweet as the man helping them to gather their thoughts and make a final decision, and there’s a small role for Frances McDormand that allows her to make a strong impression with only a few minutes of screentime. Others worth mentioning are August Winter (playing someone transgender who provides yet another interesting nuance to the ongoing conversation), Michelle McLeod, Sheila McCarthy, and Shayla Brown, all helping to show more and more ways in which the lives of the women have been impacted over the years by the behaviour of the men.

As weighty and dialogue-heavy as this is, Polley excels at knowing how to treat the material onscreen. We’re shown the aftermath of horrific events, not the abuse itself, and there’s enough movement to stop it from feeling like a stage play, which could so easily have been the case. A lot of scenes are visually drab, as you might expect with a film about this kind of community, but moments of sunshine make infrequent appearances, providing welcome respite from the pain and sadness. I would like to read the Toews book one day, but this feels like a great achievement in how it has been moved from the page to the screen.

Women Talking may not be a film that you want to rush out to see, but it’s a strong and confident work of art. And you might find yourself considering a repeat viewing of it as soon as the end credits roll. I certainly did.

9/10

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Unsane (2018)

Steven Soderbergh has a way of presenting familiar material in a way that makes it feel fresh and interesting, whether it's the more naturalistic and low-key fights in Haywire, the glossy coating that encases the trashiness of Side Effects, or the effortless cool that transforms many of the films he has done with George Clooney in the leading role.

Unsane is quite a standard psychological thriller, competently put together but not spectacular in any way. The only new thing that Soderbergh brings to the table is filming it all on a phone (and it's not the first film to be made that way, but it may be the first relatively mainstream film to utilise that approach).

Claire Foy plays Sawyer Valentini, a young woman who goes to therapy sessions in order to deal with the big problem in her life, which viewers are left wondering about. Has Sawyer been seeing a stalker everywhere, was she traumatised by a past event, or is her mind refusing to give her any peace? Things get worse for Sawyer when she signs what she thinks is a standard bit of paperwork and ends up committed to a mental institution against her will. She is determined to be released, stating that she isn't crazy, but that's also what crazy people say. And then she realises that one of the staff members is her stalker.

There's a very good central performance here from Foy, who is supported by Joshua Leonard (as the possible stalker), Juno Temple (another patient in the facility), and Jay Pharoah (also another patient), all doing good work. And you get a nice cameo role for Amy Irving, so I have no problems with the cast.

The script, written by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer, isn't as good as the cast deserve. It's okay, especially considering that these writers previously gave us films such as, well, Just My Luck and The Spy Next Door, but it's often either not as tight as it could be or it's just too predictable. The ideas here are more important than the dialogue, this isn't a film full of quotable lines, but the fact that those ideas end up lacking a certain something is a disappointment.

Soderbergh directs with his usual level of polish, even through a phone camera, but he never feels like the best fit for the material. Imagine what De Palma could have done here, or perhaps M. Night Shyamalan. Having recently been reminded of her talent, Lynne Ramsay could have taken us further into a troubled mind. But we're stuck with Soderbergh, who does fine. He just doesn't make things as interesting or thrilling as they could be.

6/10

You can buy Unsane here.
Americans can buy it here.