The Practice of Lingering in All of Us Strangers
In the vaguely surrealist universe of All of Strangers (2023), Andrew Haigh composes two worlds. The protagonist, Adam, splits his time evenly between his London apartment – lit with a somewhat heavy hand and an orange-teal color-grading in mind – and the airy farmhouse of his early childhood, bathed in the warm glow of fond memory.
The film isn’t shy about physical intimacy: the sexual chemistry with Paul Mescal’s character Harry is electric at times, tense and stilted at others, and the tenderness between Adam and the ghosts of his parents is raw and charged with a million unspoken words. Even the camera is delicate, cradling its subjects’ faces in tight close-ups and handheld explorations of their bodies in embrace.
Adam is a profoundly lonely man – his entire existence seems to revolve around fear and trepidation. He is terrified of clichés. He winces at his father’s anecdote about knowing his son was gay from an early age because he could never throw a ball right: “You make me sound like a horrible cliché.” And in the disclosure of his parents’ untimely demise, he remarks that a car accident was, admittedly, “not a very original death.” I found this quirk to be an incredibly thoughtful detail in the character sketch of Adam, a starving screenwriter striving for originality, as artists often are. This fear results in a paralysis; we never actually see Adam write, save for one measly scene heading: “EXT. SUBURBAN HOUSE 1987.” He has had very little professional success, but writing appears to be his only source of income – a fact which contributes to the film’s illogical foundation. In fact, I would argue that Haigh relies a little too heavily on suspension of disbelief, without enough true surrealism to support.
The film, as a cinematic experience, was a careful and lovely investigation into a queer man’s complacency in his own solitude, and it manages a slow pacing and climax-delay without getting boring. Throughout the film, however, I found myself waiting fervently for a tonal shift. There is a sort of discomfort that arises from the film’s lack of conflict, along with several other mildly unsettling moments: the image of a full grown Andrew Scott wading into his parents’ bed in ill-fitting children’s pajamas, for one.
As the film drew to a close, I became rapidly disappointed, mostly because I wish indie films weren’t so terrified of happy endings, but also because if any character deserves one, it would be Adam. But then I realized that it could, in fact, be read as such.
Adam’s fear of being alone plagued his childhood even before his parents’ sudden death, and in his words, only solidified as he got older. And yet, he manages to survive this fear by reconciling with his parents post-mortem and allowing them to pass on with a contented, lens-flared parting scene. Ultimately, this is a movie about catharsis, and it takes a nonjudgmental stance on lingering in the past. Despite being romantically and sexually stunted, Adam is remarkably emotionally regulated until his ketamine-induced panic attack at the nightclub, which we only see snippets of before he wakes up the next morning to Harry calming him down from a nightmare. But, per my interpretation of the Sixth Sense-esque dénouement reveal, Adam got himself home that night – not Harry – and thus, is a capable self-soother.
One could interpret the narrative of All of Us Strangers as Adam’s depressive descent into delusion and isolation, or, more optimistically, an emotional odyssey at the end of which he finds compassion for himself. I am privy to the latter: a navigation of the intricate realms of emotional healing, ones that don’t necessarily have to come at the expense of reality.