After returning to his apartment from a fire alarm in the middle of the night, Adam (Andrew Scott), is reunited with his writer’s block when there is a knock on his door.  Harry (Paul Mescal), a neighbor in the complex, asks if he wants to share a drink with him.  Adam declines as he has a trip planned for the next day back to his childhood home, hoping to find some inspiration for his screenplay.  He is shocked when he arrives at the house to see his parents (Jamie Bell, Claire Foy) there, as they died when Adam was younger in a car accident, but now, parents and child sit at the table the same age.  Back at the apartment, Adam bumps into Harry again, but this time invites the man up to his room and they begin to navigate a tentative relationship together, though Harry has concerns about Adam’s continued visits back to his childhood home.  

Andrew Haigh directs All of Us Strangers, his adaptation of Taichi Yamada’s novel, Strangers, a meditative and supernatural reflection on love and life that debuted at Telluride Film Festival ahead of its Searchlight Pictures sponsored release.  The 106-minute film follows a very loose narrative structure, opting instead to approach the story as a free flow of emotion and sentiment.  Haigh leads his small cast through the very personally felt material, and Jamie D. Ramsay lends a similarly evocative look to the film that warns of the dangers of retreating into the warm embrace of memory even when the present feels dark and cold.  The meticulous assembly paid off, netting the film immediate acclaim out of the festival as well as multiple BAFTA Award nominations, but Searchlight remained hesitant to give it a wide theatrical release and finally shuffled it onto Hulu where it became widely available to the anticipating audiences. 

Haigh gives the film a rather formless shape, and while it is about the only way to accurately approach this story, it makes for a difficult experience to watch.  It is a film that only works when it is not investigated as it operates totally in the emotional register without much care or need to flesh out an actual narrative.  Having built a filmography that dissects the emotions, specifically emotions under the microscope, Haigh is able to consistently imbue each of these sequences with powerful moments that, in the moment, will affect even the most critical in the audience, but emotional catharsis without narrative support is just blatant manipulation.  To be clear, all filmmaking is manipulation, but the lack of a narrative here really holds the film back from being all it could have been. 

Thankfully, though, the emotional chapters that occupy the runtime are very well done.  Without being able to comment on the content of the novel, the film still feels like Haigh is working through some very personal issues with this film. Even though the film is not strictly autobiographical, through Adam, Haigh is having returning conversations with his parents about issues such as identity, life, love, and death that he did not have the acuity to do so when he was growing up in the Thatcher era.  The structure also allows these conversations to happen where everyone involved is an adult so they can grapple with their relationships without the power dynamic of a parent to a young child getting in the way sort of like a reverse-engineered Petite Maman (2022) in which writer/director Céline Sciamma explores a weekend of make-believe shared between a young daughter and her mother who has appeared as a child next door. While none of us can comment on what this film means personally to Haigh, for us watching on with the barrier of the screen between us, it very much feels like a therapy session put to film and though there are elements that may transcend, the conversations had are all well-trodden ground that do not offer much in the way of new ideas or insight as everything gets tied up nicely and nothing is explored too deeply.  

The biggest reason as to why the film does not work as a whole, though, lies on Scott’s shoulders. Foy and Bell are giving the actor so much and yet he responds with so little. Even Mescal who is off in his own world for much of the film, when he interacts with Scott – characters with a very separate dynamic than with Foy and Bell – Scott approaches the scene with the same dazed, sad boy demeanor full of emotional shorthand but lacking in any depth. Safe for a scene late in the film when he describes the car accident to his parents, omitting details of the actual events so as to bring them peace, the performance is rather one-note relying on audiences to simply understand that he is dealing with big emotions as he pouts and shakes through his tears in front of Ramsay’s lens. Instead of painting a portrait, the film expects audiences to graft their own experience onto the rather blank canvas of grief that Scott provides. 

That brings us to the problem with Harry. Ramsay often films the budding relationship between the two men in a gorgeous palate of blue and gold night light, so it is impossible to view and not have a wave of heat and eroticism wash over us. Digging deeper, potentially due again to Scott’s performance, this encounter that is only slightly more than a fling is structurally shaky. The final reveal of the film, though, does exonerate Scott from some of the blame here as we learn that, like Adam’s parents, Harry has also been a ghost all along. It is the final nail in the coffin of a film that has already spent the preceding 100 or so minutes frustrating audiences as it lays on yet another tragedy. To be generous to All of Us Strangers, Haigh is seemingly using the film as an avenue for grace and acceptance, of moving on from a loss, and while the process of filmmaking may very well have allowed him to achieve that in himself, the effect it has on audiences is quite the opposite. To be disingenuous, Haigh is piling onto his audience all of the easy-to-grab gay baggage and then denies them a true resolution. Instead, Adam is left to clean up the mess, putting his own needs on the back burner to comfort the apparition of Harry as the camera pulls up from the two of them on the bed, reminiscent of the final shot in Tsai Ming-liang’s less taught but equally empty I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006). 

Haigh’s endeavor here is well-intentioned, but the execution is the film’s fatal flaw. Totally divorced from reality, it cannot support even the most cursory of questions audiences ask themselves when just trying to reconcile what they are seeing on screen. It fits well within his canon of work that favors “vibes” over story, but the extreme intensification of emotion that he delivers here goes beyond what can be conveyed on film; at least in the terms of which All of Us Strangers is conversing. He feels almost afraid to interrogate too deeply lest he strike a nerve, but that jolt is exactly what is missing from the film. Instead, we are left to wander in the same directionless haze that Adam finds himself in, not quite at rock bottom but not far from it, and Haigh offers little in the way of guidance for either us or his characters.