All of Us Strangers Review: A Journey Into the Profound Mysteries of the Male Universe
Starring: Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy
Director: Andrew Haigh
Where to Watch: In Theaters
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4.5/5 (four and a half stars)
Freely based on the novel of the same name by Taichi Yamada, All of Us Strangers is the new film by Andrew Haigh starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy, and Jaime Bell. After being presented at the Telluride Film Festival in August 2023. All of Us Strangers is a journey into loneliness, resentment, and the importance that, for better or for worse, our families have on us. But it is also a story of love, acceptance, and forgiveness. “Every love story is a ghost story”, read the title of the biography dedicated to David Foster Wallace, a brilliant author who died too soon after an uninterrupted struggle with the specter of depression. A prophetic title, because truly every human relationship is populated with ghosts, shadows of the past that each of us carries with us as a legacy every time we transmigrate from an old story to a new one, when we make another friendship and perhaps close one historical, as well as when it puts an end – not without pain – to a bond with someone you loved very much, from a lover to a close family member.
And director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 years old) seems to have unconsciously made this title-mantra his own, outlining through the new film he directed – and wrote – a dramatic ghost story, which is in reality much more: we are talking about All of Us Strangers). Presented as an Italian premiere at the 21st edition of Alice nella Città, the film brings together a cast of British excellence on the screen, starting from Andrew Scott (Fleabag) through the very popular Paul Mescal (Aftersun) up to the rediscovered Jamie Bell (Rocketman) and Claire Foy (Women Talking) to tell a modern story of solitudes that meet at the wrong time, of tragic wounds difficult to fill with the gold of Kintsugi and much broader reflections on sexual and even national identity, as demonstrated by the London location. And right in contemporary London, during an ordinary night, the screenwriter Adam (Scott) has a chance encounter with a mysterious neighbor, Harry (Mescal).
They both live in the same almost empty apartment building, they need company and don’t want to spend the night alone, especially Harry: this meeting will break Adam’s routine and, while the two continue their relationship, the screenwriter never stops being obsessed with the fragments of his past, wandering through the terraced houses on the outskirts where he grew up and among which he finds not only his old house but also his parents, who seem to still live there exactly as he left them, thirty minutes later. years after their death. All of Us Strangers is a cosmic melodrama and a torn fantasy, which passes from the tactile to the phantasmatic, isolating the characters in a landscape suspended between an alienating center (a practically uninhabited London building) and an idealized suburb (a villa surrounded by greenery) and connected by a train running on tracks beyond the laws of this world.
All of Us Strangers Review: The Story
London, 2023. We enter the apartment of a screenwriter, Adam (Andrew Scott) that’s his name, with an apparent writer’s block exacerbated by a tragic past. He lives alone in an uninhabited building, or almost so. Thanks to the unmotivated triggering of the fire alarm, Adam, once on the ground floor, discovers that he has only one neighbor, whom he glimpses by scanning the upper floors. The two strangers find themselves face to face only thanks to the cheekiness (fueled by the Japanese alcoholic drink he holds in one hand) of Adam’s only neighbor, Harry (Paul Mescal) who would like some company. He feels alone, he jokingly states that there are “vampires at his door”. Embarrassed and intrigued, Adam declines the offer.
From this moment on, Haigh’s caressing direction transports us into a dreamlike atmosphere, to say the least, in which our protagonist’s past slowly emerges. Orphaned at the age of 12 due to a car accident that took his parents away from his life. To overcome the creative block that afflicts him, Adam decides to return to his old home where his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) who are younger than him at the moment because they were crystallized at the moment of death, open the door for him and both us and we are aware that it is only a reunion that is as imaginary as it is healing and cathartic. Adam will return to them several times, openly declaring his homosexuality to that couple who, in perfect 80s style, still reveal themselves to be slightly tetragonal to their son’s declaration, even though they had already guessed what his sexual preferences might be, revealing quite a few resentments of the child Adam who felt misunderstood, resentments that are washed away by the tears shed on both sides.
Playing a key role is the 80s soundtrack (Always on My Mind; Tainted Love and many other iconic pieces) which gives an air of carefreeness, the same that Adam lived in his childhood before it was tragically taken away from him. The music accompanies family meetings in which Adam has a dreamy look that makes you shiver due to the brutality of his tenderness. But let’s get back to Adam and Harry. Adam decided to make up for that first awkward encounter by indulging his curiosity and giving himself the chance to experience a carnality that had so far been dormant and poorly experienced with the stranger downstairs. The two meet in Adam’s house and talk about episodes of real life, of how growing up they felt like strangers due to those irreconcilable differences>> exacerbated by the society in which they lived. Together with passion, understanding, and complicity grow and that same evening they decide to “come out” by going to a gay club and dancing to the notes of “Promised Land” by Joe Smooth which almost seems to want to establish the arrival in a promised land free of judgments and labels made especially for the two of them.
In a painful new visit to his parents, Adam is revealed that he will soon have to let them go and that this enchantment is destined to fade. Before being dismembered once again, or rather, definitively, the family decides to share a last meal, in which the couple will relive the deadly accident. Once home Paul decides to go to Harry, determined to live the love story with him. Adam and Harry in the moments we saw them together were always at Adam’s house, they never went down to Harry’s apartment. This is because the first evening that from strangers they became neighbors, Harry took his own life after the rejection he suffered and the door thrown in his face.
The two go upstairs, Adam reassures Harry by telling him that he is there at that moment, in his company, no matter what the state of his body is. The finale is to the tune of the poignant “The Power of Love” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood of which Adam reassuringly hums the first lines to Harry: <<I’ll protect you from the hooded claw, keep the vampires from your door>>- I will protect you from death (hooded claw) and the vampires at your door. The exact request that Harry had made of him that first evening but that he hadn’t been vulnerable enough to grasp and accept.
All of Us Strangers Review and Analysis
As has already happened in other films – a title above all, Nowhere Special by Uberto Pasolini – All of Us Strangers also represents a journey into the deepest and most unfathomable mysteries of the male universe, undertaken by a British filmmaker perhaps also to exorcise the legacy of a rigid culture, which has compressed male emotions to the point of making them cryptic and even unknown to those directly involved. “Boys Don’t Cry” we could say, and this aspect also flows into the kaleidoscope of colored and irregular glasses created by Haigh, who relies on the power of the looks, the silences, and the very close-ups of his interpreters, on the explosive force of their interpretations that vibrate like tuning forks crossed by emotions, in an emotional overture that involves the spectator until he feels it.
And this crescendo is also rendered by an aestheticized direction, at times strongly permeated by the British psychedelic culture of Ken Russell of The Devils (one of the many films directed by the filmmaker) or by the bizarre eccentricities of Kenneth Anger, director of the 70s. Emotional oddities mark Adam’s slow descent into the burrow of an acidic White Rabbit, due to which the boundaries between imagination and hallucination become increasingly blurred and sensitive, frightening and unpredictable exactly like a portal between two worlds. That same border that Harry also finds himself, despite himself, crossing, partly by choice and partly to chase Adam, a new Orpheus who tries to get Eurydice back from the Underworld into which she was dragged: but also the boy, with his sad eyes, he just needs to be saved and not feel too alone during one of the very long nights marked by a blood moon in the sky, which silently watches over human destinies.
The protagonists share a condition of alienating loneliness, a situation that is represented in every shot and in every scene starting from the uninhabited building, a loneliness that fills every aspect of Adam’s life. It is Adam who is the common thread among the few characters who haunt the story. All of Us Strangers is a journey into the past, but above all, it is a story of love, redemption, and forgiveness. Forgiveness for others, but above all for oneself. Adam is anchored in the memory of his childhood, a period of life that was not particularly happy, but it is the resentment for a life he never had the chance to live that pushes him to return to his parent’s house. Everything gives the illusion that time has stopped: from his parents’ house to the way they are dressed; Adam himself seems imprisoned in a bubble.
From the aesthetics to the music to the television shows that aired decades before that Adam uses as a background to write, everything takes us back to a past that is only apparently better, but extremely fragile as Adam himself says: “It seems like we live in a better time, but it doesn’t take much to reopen old wounds”. Haigh’s screenplay is infused with nostalgia for a time that had its dark sides, for a difficult childhood that ended too quickly and left Adam completely alone to face the discovery of his homosexuality, the cruelest period of his life. AIDS, complex adolescence, but also without anyone with whom to share the best memories such as having bought an apartment, being able to make a living from writing, or his relationship with Harry. Adam also remembers his parents in an honest way, not sweetened by the desire to paint a better family than it is.
His parents are a traditionalist couple where homosexuality is seen as something distant, not natural, not every day, a condition frowned upon. While his mother is worried and dreams of a marriage with a woman and grandchildren for him, his father realizes the mistakes he has made, and his failure to be close to Adam when he needed him most. All of Us Strangers bring to the screen a sad everyday reality where homophobia is not represented through physical but psychological violence. A homophobia that distances, alienates, forces people to live on the margins of society, alone and abandoned. Stranger is a film made of pauses, silences, and extrapolated moments. Nothing is left to chance. Haigh both in the intimate direction, both in the silences and the music, and the cast reduced to the essential, but where each actor manages to carve out a space for himself, he manages to conceive an intelligent film. Intelligent in the way he combines the pieces, carrying forward a dramatic story that however does not fall into the usual clichés.
All of Us Strangers Review: The Last Words
Are we all alone in the universe, lonely stars scattered in a remote galaxy, or can the force of love unite even what is distant, in time and even in physical space? All of Us Strangers also tries to answer these questions by creating perhaps the definitive film on the very concept of love and feeling, instilling doubts, trying to provide solutions (but never answers), and exorcising even the worst specter of all: that of the past, with the risk of remaining stuck in our tragic wounds without being able to move forward, stuck in a path of growth and self-determination to finally truly know ourselves. Being able to hug each other again, clarify, apologize, confess. Become children again, perhaps, lying in bed together. “As if the future didn’t matter”. And no longer because the pain has turned everything off. But because in love there is only light that shines. Like a star.
All of Us Strangers Review: A Journey Into the Profound Mysteries of the Male Universe - Filmyhype
Director: Andrew Haigh
Date Created: 2024-02-22 18:24
4.5
Pros
- The issue of loneliness and how it is addressed
- The story is full of suffering and drama, but does not give in to clichés
- The cast and direction are the real highlights that enrich a brilliant screenplay reduced to the essentials
Cons
- It may be a little slow at first, but slowness soon becomes essential to enter Adam's daily life and better understand his world
