All of Us Strangers: Naked Body, Naked Soul, Naked Andrew Scott.
The transcendent secrets of love, longing, and loss stunningly shared in Andrew Haigh's version of a Japanese ghost story starring Andrew Scott, an actor so tactile you can feel his skin.
There is love in All of Us Strangers , maybe more love than I’ve ever seen onscreen. It’s a sublime story that fulfills our wish that love endures after death.
In the Greek myth, Orpheus mourned his Eurydice with such force that he sang her back to life. The idea of reconnecting with the dead you loved and who loved you is irresistible. A few years ago, Joseph Heller’s daughter Erica put together One Last Lunch, a book of conversations in which writers had lunch with the dead person they most wanted to see. Allegra Huston lunched with her mother Ricki Huston, who died when she was four; the writer James Jones’s daughter Kaylie visited him during the Second World War and told him who he would later become. I grew so involved in writing my visit with a dead friend that I never handed in the story. I wanted to keep my experience separate, private, make it my own book. There’s a penetrating intimacy to these dialogues with the dead, as if the idea itself were a violation of the greatest mystery.
It’s not a ghost story when it’s about people you love. It’s another dimension of truth.
Which makes the premise of All of Us Strangers that much more intense.
The British director Andrew Haigh adapted the Japanese novel Strangers into a script that surrounds the impossible encounters with a solid reality. He gives the story a flawless internal logic, casts his actors for what you remember about them as well as what you see, and directs them to such a tactile pitch of truth that all separation dissolves, not only between them, but between them and you . As I said, the film is love.
The hero, Adam, is played by Andrew Scott, who is best known for being the ‘hot priest’ who sinned with Phoebe Waller Bridge in Fleabag -- a man so attractive that Fleabag melted, a man so aware that he could see Fleabag talking to the camera, a man so present that he kept asking her not to, a man so much a priest that the affair could not continue.
Adam, a lonely gay screenwriter, will take a suburban train to go visit his parents who have been dead for thirty years. Andrew Scott’s endlessly mobile features — a rare thing in a handsome man – bring constant changes to his screen presence, and the hypersensitive Adam’s transparent emotions transform the small, bold, fantasy All of Us Strangers into a great and deeply moving film.
The Academy presumably did not nominate Andrew Scott for the best actor Oscar because the voters did not believe he was acting.
We first see Adam asleep in a blanket as dawn rises to his windows with the beeps and rumble of the city. He lives in a crisp new high rise in Croydon, south London, so new that it’s mostly unoccupied, and his rooms are small but stylish, painted Prussian blue, with fancy lamps—an orange shade, a red tripod— so we know he has a career real enough to pay for highly designed things.
He’s trying to write about his childhood, with some of his old toys as prompts.
One night after an alarm goes off he has to go stand outside the high-rise, and he sees, looking down through a window, a young man who might be the only other tenant.
But back to Adam’s screenplay. He’s set up the beginning—“Suburban House. 1987. Exterior Day.” He has a photo. He takes a train to the house in the photo , and finally dares ring the doorbell.
His parents died in a car crash just before he was 12.
His young and beautiful mother opens the door. We instinctively know that she will never let us down, because she’s played by Claire Foy, who was the young Queen Elizabeth, the reassuring, steady, and immutably kind face of the mother-monarchy. The mother says “There you are!” in the most matter-of-fact way, and brings him into the house where he lived , which is exactly as it was then, before his parents died.
The mother looks at him and says, “You were just a boy but now you’re not, you’re totally different but you’re still you”— and adds “I thought you’d be hairier”.
Dad seems curiously unformed, too young, his shoulders too narrow, his mustache a bit of a joke. He’s just not old enough to be a Dad. Can we tell that he’s Jamie Bell, who played the boy dancer Billy Elliott in the film of that name 23 years ago?
It’s after Adam returns to the high rise, on the neat prosaic train with its bright poles and clean windows, that he sees the neighbor again. The neighbor who’s played by Paul Mescal, is called Harry. He’s young , he’s got a mustache, he’s waving a bottle of Japanese whisky. It’s a come-on. It’s the loneliness of the high-rise dwellers.
Adam eventually lets him in. “Just checking you’re queer” Harry says.
Adam’s longing for love and his incapacitating fear of love scramble his features and make his body sweat.
All of Us Strangers is candid about the clammy fumble of a first encounter , and candid about the confident caresses of sexual trust. All of Us Strangers is the first film that conveys all the dimensions of seeing another body naked for the first time: the desire to touch and the urge to withdraw, the hope, the embarrassment, the tentative curiosity flesh to flesh. In the sex scenes—and there are many—you feel the smoothness of skin, and the temperature of the room, and the scrape and wrinkle of sheets.
Young Harry soothes Adam into being loved. Adam comes out to his mother, then to his father. Adam wants to show Harry his parents. Adam will comfort Harry.
All of Us Strangers is a transcendent, exalting and emotionally extreme film that hits the place beyond tears, the place you go after you’ve sat and howled your mourning, after the tears are used up and your noise stops, and you feel a calm that’s like a thank you from the other side.
The other side is a reality in this strange and beautiful film, in a year of piercingly original films.
All of Us Strangers reminds me of the opening image in Helen Whitney’s remarkable 2017 documentary about death, Into The Night that illustrates the dream of a dying therapist: many small vessels bobbing on the water at night, each one with its own light, separate, but within sight one of the other. All of them, strangers.
Beautiful review. You capture its magic. This film is so delicate it can slip through your fingers, but somehow you won't let go as it is that dear. Andrew Scott is a genius.