The impeccably sweet and subtle 2011 love story, Weekend, was a breakout hit for English director Andrew Haigh. Depicting a burgeoning gay relationship at a time when movies that centred around non-heterosexual romance were still considered niche (or played for camp laughs), Haigh’s compellingly real dialogue and his actors’ compassionate performances rightly won accolades.
He followed this up with 2015′s heartfelt 45 Years, pivoting to reflect on the long marriage of an older couple, played by Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay.
Now, released in time to attract the 2024 awards buzz it deserves in spades, All of Us Strangers again proves Haigh’s talent for crafting deeply affecting relationship dramas.
Forty-something Adam (Fleabag’s “hot priest” Andrew Scott, here a revelation) is a lonely screenwriter, blocked professionally and personally, living alone in a sterile new-build apartment block in London. By day, he stares at blank pages, snorts the odd line of cocaine and lolls in front of reality TV.
When propositioned one night by his rather forward neighbour, the much younger Harry (Aftersun’s Paul Mescal, who is sensational), Adam’s beguiled curiosity is overridden by his crippling reticence. Instead, he hops on a train to the suburb of his childhood home where, much to the audience’s surprise and swift delight, Adam visits his long-dead parents to catch them up on his life in the intervening years.
It’s a key part of human healing to be able to have those unspoken conversations with people we have loved and lost, and watching Adam interact with his warmly loving mum and dad is extraordinarily moving. Haigh’s script goes further than a one-sided reproach to imbue Claire Foy (The Crown) and Jamie Bell, as Adam’s parents, with their own curiosity and emotional journey. Both actors are sensational as the stopped-in-time adults whose son is now their age, but Foy, in particular, is heartbreaking as she gazes at her grown-up child with a palpable wistfulness at the decades they have passed separately. Her confused queries about his life are classic 1980s, and gently hilarious. For added poignancy, Haigh shot these scenes in the house he grew up in, returning rooms to their time-capsule rendition of Adam’s memory.
With an enthrallingly original conceit (based loosely on the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada), this is stunning. Not just for its devastatingly moving story and superb ensemble, but as a powerful meditation on how we grapple with, and move on from, grief and childhood wounds.
Rating out of 5: ★★★★★
All of Us Strangers, directed by Andrew Haigh, is in cinemas now.
