All of Us Strangers | 2023
Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal in Andrew Haigh's ALL OF US STRANGERS.
It's difficult not to get personal writing about a film like Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers. I didn't really write about it when I first saw it back in December of last year. I managed a half-hearted piece for my top ten write-up (where it came in at number five), but it somehow felt too close, too raw, for me to fully grapple with.
Revisiting the film nearly a year later on Criterion's new 4K Blu-Ray, my thoughts feel slightly more cogent, but there's something about the impact of this film that feels particularly ineffable, somehow existing outside of space and time, much like the characters who populate it. At the center is Adam (Andrew Scott), a gay forty-something screenwriter living the bachelor's life in a mostly empty new apartment building in the London suburbs, who forges a tentative and unlikely connection with his upstairs neighbor, Harry (Paul Mescal), a younger man whose less inhibited but troubled nature awakens something in Adam he thought he'd lost.
While Adam and Harry are exploring their new romance, Adam has also reconnected with his parents, who died when he was a child. They are living in his childhood home, seemingly untouched by time, affording him the chance to say things that were never said and to hear things he was never able to hear. Through this mysterious and delicate dance, Adam finally has the chance to reconnect with the family he lost, and heal from a lifetime of loneliness and loss.
Haigh is walking an incredibly delicate line here between grounded emotion and sentimentality, and it's a needle he threads beautifully. The magical realism of All of Us Strangers in some ways feels like a kind of queer exorcism, a wistful exploration of family dynamics and chosen families that will be readily familiar to an LGBT audience. It's a collective confrontation of trauma that also celebrates the deep beauty of the connections we make amongst ourselves. I think that's what has bedeviled my attempts to put my love for this film into words; it simply hits too close to home. In the end, however, I found myself deeply grateful for the people in my life, as if the world around me seemed somehow brighter. There is a radiance to this film that simply must be experienced.
Criterion's new 4K release isn't as special feature-heavy as some - but it's something of a relief that we have this on disc at all, considering the way Disney mostly dumped it on Hulu, giving it a half-hearted release through their Searchlight label. The colors really pop on the 4K - Haigh's way of highlighting faces in warm hues contrasting against cool backgrounds really pops here.
"I've always felt like a stranger in my own family," Harry muses at one point in the film. Therein lies the crux of All of Us Strangers. We're all just strangers trying to find human connection, separated by time, space, by faceless suburban structures and personal differences. And yet those sparks, those moments when something finally clicks, feel like small miracles. Those moments, like this film, are something to be cherished.
