'All of Us Strangers' is a Visually Gorgeous Paean to Grief, Acceptance & Love

With All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh (Weekend, Looking) has made a film that’s about a few things. Foremostly, it’s about ghosts – literal ghosts, but also figurative ones, phantoms created by emotions we don’t know what to do with or feel like forgetting. All of Us Strangers understands it’s difficult to classify the love we feel and even harder to articulate how we lack it. Parents, lovers, companions – we depend on them in ways that, as grief will remind us, are not sustainable, and their absence feels like an impossible calling to return to a different world and body. But also, maybe more importantly, Haigh’s film is also about how London’s New Build apartments may be the most haunted buildings in the country.

Adam (Andrew Scott) is a screenwriter and lonely resident of a sparsely populated apartment building that’s just cropped up in a corner of London. His upper-floor window gives a terrific view of a skyline he feels just on the edge of; Haigh opens the film with Adam’s face looming massive over the city in the reflection of the glass as the sun rises. One of the building’s only other occupants is Harry (Paul Mescal), who one night enters Adam’s life with a knock at his door, a regional English accent, and a cheeky invitation to spend the night together.

After initially rejecting him, Adam and Harry soon sleep together, imbuing the cold, unfeeling building with a sorely lacking passion and intimacy. This strand parallels Adam’s main journey of discovery – he’s drawn back to his childhood home where he finds his thirty-years-dead parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) acting as if they’ve only gone a year or two without seeing each other. Scott’s perfectly observed reaction – careful, hesitant skepticism – shows a sincere yearning for this fantastical homecoming to be real, and thankfully, both he and Haigh treat this reunion like it is. Impossible? Maybe. Imagined? Most likely. But it’s undoubtedly truthful.