all of us strangers quick review

initial reaction, minimal editing, all tears

this review is not meant to feel polished it is meant to be a dump of my emotions because i feel too much all at once and don’t know what to do with my feelings

warning: spoilers ahead

This past weekend, I had the unique opportunity to go to a free semi-early screening of Andrew Haigh’s All Of Us Strangers, a romantic fantasy starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal.

I went into this movie only knowing a couple key facts:

• This movie is sexy as hell and Paul Mescal looks incredible in it

• Paul Mescal’s character (Harry) helps Andrew Scott’s character (Adam) through coping with the death of his parents

Knowing these two facts, you an imagine my shock when in the first 20 minutes or so of the movie, Adam sees and interacts with his supposed dead parents.

What primarily stuck out to me about this scene was that it established some grounding ‘rules’ in terms of how the film handles the dead and, particularly, ghosts. In this scene, Adam’s parents are aware of the time that has passed in between their death and the present day. They look at Adam and know that he is an adult; they do not see him as the twelve year old boy they knew before. They also are able to physically touch Adam, hugging him, holding his hand, grounding him in some sort of reality. And finally, they hold the same habits of the past, as when they died. They still smoke cigarettes at dinner and their clothes are blatantly outdated.

At this point of the film, I felt some kind of nervousness out of fear the plot would delve into cliche territory, the risk that always comes when handling the subject of the living talking to the dead. I became especially wary when, upon a later meeting with his parents, Adam reveals to his parents that he is gay and his mother has difficulty initially accepting this fact. She has difficulty adjusting, still stuck in the past. She references that ‘horrible disease’, she clutches Adam’s hand and tells him that it’s a “very lonely life”, to which Adam quickly corrects her and tells her that if he feels lonely (which he most certainly does), it is not because he is gay.

But my nerves were quickly eased as the movie continued, showing Adam interacting more and more with his family and getting the closure he needed. There were incredibly touching conversations between him and his parents. The dialogue, while heavy-handed and blunt, moved me to tears with its sheer rawness and genuineness. I cried particularly hard when Adam’s father apologized for not checking in on him when he heard him crying in his room after being bullied at school and then hugged Adam, with the camera panning to a mirror and showing Adam’s young self enveloped in this crushing, loving hug.

All of Us Strangers is a tale about grief and loneliness and coping with loss. At first, I thought the movie was only about all of these things in regards to parental death. We see Adam get the closure that he needs from his parents—acceptance for his sexuality, validation for his existence, affirmation for his identity. But we also see the detrimental effects of his parents’ presence in his life, where in a particular turning point in the movie, Adam attempts to introduce Harry, his lover, to his parents but they refuse to open the door. This refusal deeply distresses Adam, causing him to break down, banging on the glass window, shouting and yelling, until he breaks it. This moment is a direct reference to an anecdote his mother had revealed earlier in the movie, where she talks about how as a kid Adam got locked out of the house that he had banged so hard on the glass he shattered the window, too. It is in these moments that Adam’s parents, as well as the audience, realizes that their presence may have brought Adam comfort, but also has caused him to regress. To be unable to move on. And really this is the heart of the movie’s message on grief, the need to let go and the pain that comes with that inability.

Adam and his family then go to a diner as Adam prepares to say his final goodbyes to his parents. This scene is absolutely devastating with some of the most gut wrenching dialogue throughout the entire film.

“I do love you very much. Somehow even more now that I do know you.”

It was at this point that I really thought the film was going to end. Adam got closure with his family. They approved of Harry. They said to treat him well and to really cherish him.

But of course, no movie can have someone as brilliant and as shattering as Paul Mescal and not end in a devastating blow. It is only minutes later from Adam’s farewell with his family that Adam finds his way into Harry’s apartment, excited to dedicate himself fully to him, and sees Harry’s corpse, festering and rotten, in the bath with a bottle of booze, the very same bottle that Harry was clutching when he first meets Adam in the very beginning of the film. It is then revealed that Harry had died that night, when Adam closed the door on him and didn’t let him in.

This is when I felt my chest truly tighten, realizing that all these beautiful moments and scenes shared between Adam and Harry—tender intimate sex, late dinners and movie nights, intense, wild clubbing and dancing—may not have even happened at all. How could they when Harry’s been dead from the start?

But it was also at this moment that I remembered something that Adam’s mother had told him in one of their encounters, where Adam gently asks if this, them being here, is real. His mother then asks, “Does it feel real?” to which Adam replies yes and she then says something to the effect of “Then does it really matter?”

This theme of real and unreal pulses throughout the movie in every nook and cranny, as we watch Adam wrestle through life in the movie. We, as the audience, grow more and more confused of the timeline. What is real? What is not? But as Adam clutches Harry, telling him to go upstairs, to not look at his body in the bathtub and instead to just lie in the bed a little longer, we are reminded that if it is real to us, then that is enough.

The movie ends with Adam holding Harry, or what we now know to be Harry’s ghost, in a pose vaguely reminiscent of the Broomistega and Thrinaxodon bracing for the end of the world, as the camera pans out and they become glass and then stars and you are left in the theater feeling breathless and chewed up and spit out whole.

//

After the film, I sat in what I now realize is denial. I did not want to exist in a world where the movie ended with Andrew Scott’s character existing in a world without Paul Mescal’s. It just didn’t make sense to me. I then convinced myself that, maybe, all along Adam and Harry have both been dead, their eerie, empty apartment building being a metaphor for purgatory and their spirits unable to rest until they reach closure. And now that they have reached their respective closures, they’re able to pass to the next life together.

I couldn’t bring myself to believe that Adam lived on after Harry because it didn’t make any sense to me. How could he have gone through the closure of with his parents and realizing that he needs to let go in order to be free only to clutch onto Harry’s ghost at the end?

But as I sat with the movie more and tried to feel calm and normal and sane, my cousin (who had seen the movie with me) pointed out that this was not him clutching on to Harry or holding him back. Rather, it was an acceptance of his passing. A gentle hold, not a harsh grab, as Adam lets this love and realization wash over him.

All of Us Strangers is a story of grief and loss and coping. And God, do you get all of those things. We see Adam, this character who has never loved before, too damaged by the loneliness forced upon him by both deep homophobia and the loss of his parents, grow into someone who not only finds love and learns to love, but loses love and learns how to lose that love.

This movie made me feel violently ill. I felt sick in the theater. I felt sick on the walk back to the car. I felt sick in the ride back to my house. And I sat there feeling dizzy (or as someone on Letterboxd put it, in a “grief headache”) for another hour after all of that.

I’ve never felt this way from a movie before, this gnarled knot in my chest (which funnily enough is something they talk about in the movie itself) that makes it just a bit too hard to breathe. This movie is something I will be thinking about for a long, long time.

I’ll protect you from the hooded claw / Keep the vampires from your door / When the chips are down I’ll be around / With my undying, death-defying love for you