✯✯✯✯½

The setup for All of Us Strangers feels simple enough: we’re seeing the ghosts of the people who’ve raised us long after they’re dead, just in the way that we want to remember them. This story has in fact been adapted to the screen by Japanese filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi as the horror film The Discarnates, but Andrew Haigh’s take on familiar genre elements emphasizes another sort of pain that this ghost story could be carrying along with it. And at its best, Haigh turns out some brilliantly heartbreaking work out of All of Us Strangers.

Andrew Scott stars as the lonely screenwriter Adam, who still visits his abandoned childhood home on occasion. While there, he sees the ghosts of his late parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), who take on the appearance that he remembers them by, before they died when Adam was twelve years old. But in his new apartment, he also finds himself falling in love with his neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal), who aims to show him the joys of life that he’s shielding himself from. It appears as if Adam might have found himself a way out of his longing search for love, but even this proves more difficult than expected.

The core of All of Us Strangers is incredibly heartbreaking. It’s a film all about what it feels like to see yourself as unloved, whether it be by your parents or by people around you, and how that ends up sticking with you from your childhood all the way into your adulthood. All of that heartbreak can be felt in Andrew Scott’s performance, in part because you’re feeling that confusion of experiencing something that seemed unfamiliar for someone like him for so long. And it also becomes a film all about how difficult it can really be to move on.

But I think there’s also something very touching about the manner by which Andrew Haigh has let this all unfold. Through the manners by which Adam is interacting with his parents, it becomes a film all about the need to be accepted by them, even long after their death. Claire Foy and Jamie Bell make for a lovely pairing too, in part because their performances make you feel every bit of the love that they had for Adam – or wanted to express properly for him while they were still around to give it to him in life. It’s also just devastating to see Adam in this position, because by that point you’re also seeing a hypothetical of what could have been, as Adam has never been fully able to process the grief from having lost two people whom he loved dearly.

Even then, I think there’s also a level of intimacy that Andrew Haigh can tap right into, especially as he explores Adam’s own sexuality in relation to everything going on around him. Paul Mescal makes for a wonderful counterpart to the lonely and introverted Adam, in part because Mescal’s character and performance are exuding livelihood at every opportunity that he has. He works as the perfect mirror to Adam, because there’s only so much that his parents, if they truly loved him, could want for him – and also because he plays this part with a great sensitivity for the people around himself.

All of Us Strangers unfolds one way, like it were a film about how difficult it can be to come out in front of your parents. But there’s a very layered story, all about the aftereffects of processing grief while not having had ample time during your youth to understand any of it. It’s also what makes this film so heartbreaking, because it gets down to the roots of why people like Adam have felt so sheltered and lonely for most of their life. It’s a film all about the search for love, after having felt that it may have eluded you for so many years, but also all about what it really means to experience that feeling of having been loved by those you look up to in life.

Watch the trailer right here.

All images via Searchlight Pictures.

Directed by Andrew Haigh
Screenplay by Andrew Haigh, from the novel The Strangers by Taichi Yamada
Produced by Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin, Sarah Harvey
Starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy
Release Date: December 17, 2023
Running Time: 105 minutes