All Of Us Strangers
New levels of heartbreak unlocked.
Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is an original, heart-wrenching film, with performances so raw I had to swallow my sobs along with my sweet-chilli cashews.
Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott (AKA Hot Priest) in All Of Us Strangers.
Adapted from Taichi Yamada’s 1987 Japanese novel Strangers, it’s part supernatural meditation, part tender love story: wholly sad, gently hopeful, and devastatingly brilliant.
Andrew Scott stars as Adam, a lonely, middle-aged screenwriter orphaned at 12. Paul Mescal is Harry, his sad-eyed love interest who appears to be the only other resident in their newly built London apartment block. Loneliness, grief and isolation are familiar terrain for writer-director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years), and once again he approaches them with restraint and poeticism. But more than anything, this is a film about the Power of Love (yes, Frankie Goes to Hollywood features more than once) and its ability to ease another’s pain.
After losing his parents in a car accident, Adam has sealed himself off from the world, becoming almost an artefact—protected by triple-glazed glass and a carefully controlled interior climate. Screenwriting offers further escape, until Harry knocks on his door one night. What begins cautiously soon opens into one of the year’s most beautiful love stories. As they draw each other back toward life, Adam also begins visiting his long-dead parents, who appear very much alive, though frozen in the 1980s.
Calling All of Us Strangers a ghost story would be misleading. The supernatural operates instead as a device to explore grief, repression, and the damage wrought by heteronormative bias on a young gay man. It imagines the conversations we all long to have with the people who made us.
Watching Adam and Harry unfurl into one another will affirm—or restore—your faith in love’s ability to heal. It’s there in the small acts: Harry running Adam a bath when he’s feverish, the gentle passing of care between them. The cinematography is painterly yet tactile, otherworldly yet grounded—lingering hands, bodies entwined, intimacy rendered with aching vulnerability. It’s raw, and it feels like healing.
At times, the sound design and visuals induce a woozy, inescapable panic, recalling Munch’s The Scream—though Haigh cites Francis Bacon’s Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X as inspiration.
Haigh’s script is generous and precise—an exercise in the art of the unsaid. Scott and Mescal are extraordinary. Mescal recently said of Scott, “We look like we’re in love.” And they do. Completely.
I believed every second of their performances and of the film—time travel and all. And judging by the glow of tissues in the dark cinema, I wasn’t alone. And while I felt their pain deeply, I also felt the warmth of their love—the tenderness, the care.
The final scene, set beneath an expansive night sky, feels more Walt Whitman than Van Gogh. Whitman’s line from Song of Myself came to mind “every atom belonging to me as much belongs to you”. All of Us Strangers is a clarion call for kindness and understanding in a world that needs it more than ever. It’s poetic, beautiful, hopeful—and if it doesn’t move you profoundly, you just might be a ghost, too.
