We first encounter Adam, an unhappy writer, knocking about his apartment in a stark tower block whose isolated surroundings suggest the late stages of a biological apocalypse. Andrew Haigh is here giving us a hint that we are about to move through an allegorical space. Taichi Yamada’s Strangers, the 1987 Japanese novel from which the film is derived, has been described as a ghost story. You could see All of Us Strangers as that. But it seems closer to an imaginative representation of the creative process.
In the course of the film, Adam, played by Andrew Scott with reliably sharp consonants, travels outwards to the house in which he grew up (actually Haigh’s childhood home in Croydon, south London). Working on an autobiographical work, he is happy to be welcomed in by a caring mum and a no-nonsense dad.
But something is amiss. Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, who play the parents, are both the guts of a decade younger than Scott. The house seems trapped in the 1980s. A string of not-quite-cool hits from that era – Frankie Goes to Hollywood, The Housemartins, Fine Young Cannibals – alert us that we are within internal space.
As Adam tries to make sense of his script, he is calling up memories of his folks, both of whom died in a car crash decades earlier, and, deeper into his thought experiment, he imagines their reactions to the man he has become.
While not doing that, our protagonist begins a sexual relationship with a scruffy, suspiciously boozy neighbour called Harry. Paul Mescal proves the perfect complement to Scott. More physical. Less measured. Younger, of course. There is a sense of Harry opening Adam up to hitherto closed-off pleasures.
The core conceit proves fecund. We are used to supernatural yarns that allow one to view the spectres as figments of the protagonist’s imagination. Here that invitation is reversed. The performances are so rooted – Foy struggles to care in the right way; Bell has an apparent battle with his own reticence – that these intellectual constructs develop into cognisant spirits.
There is much here about how attitudes to the gay experience have changed. The parents died before even their son had faced up to his own sexuality. Now talking to a grown man – indeed, their impossible elder – they cannot dismiss his sexuality, but Mum in particular falls back on to the oh-deary sympathy that, though not hostile, remains convinced this is a “lonely life”. (Thinking back on how things have developed, Tom and Harry might agree it was, at least, often a less kind life back then.) It’s a deeply moving dynamic that admits total compassion can exist where complete understanding does not.
Adam and Harry exist in what we must call “the present”. But there is also an unreal quality to their relationship. Such is the emotional and sexual intensity of their bond that the two men move through a world that, to them, seems scarcely aware of their existence. Haigh, director of the hugely acclaimed Weekend and 45 Years – as well as the undervalued Lean on Pete – has already demonstrated a gift for convincing and compelling sex scenes. He confirms that here. “It’s a very tender scene … and hot!” he said of one reasonably explicit sequence. Quite so. In all the current puritanical jabber about whether such scenes may or may not be “necessary”, too few note that they can justify their own existence … by being hot.
It adds up to an emotional, intelligent experience that, drawing on rich, glassy cinematography from Jamie Ramsay, manages to be simultaneously mournful and celebratory. So successful is the concoction that I am prepared to forgive it an emotional overreach in the dying seconds.
All of Us Strangers is in cinemas from Friday, January 26th
