On the sofa of an evening, Adam (Andrew Scott), a sweet and lonely man in his forties, watches old Top Of The Pops episodes from the 1980s, planting himself in the past, feeding himself biscuits. Opening the fridge, he surveys the remnants of a Chinese takeaway. Comfort food abounds. God knows, this man needs comfort. Some soon arrives, via the only other person living in this London tower block, the equally lonely Harry (Paul Mescal). Both crave connection.
Loneliness engulfs this film. Adam is traumatised: by a childhood in which he was bullied; by the death of his parents when he was 11; by a less enlightened, less compassionate era; and by coming of age in the 1980s, the spectre of AIDS inhibiting him even further. Sometimes, his trauma plays out like a nightmare. Throughout All Of Us Strangers, dreams, memories, fantasies and reality collide and blur. It’s all the same here, in Andrew Haigh’s desperately sad but gorgeous odyssey: a warm blanket of a film, and a tender portrait of a fragile man.
It’s hard to think of another recent drama that feels so brazenly personal.
Scott plays Adam as both closed off and an open wound, smiling and sobbing through the pain. It’s perfect casting, the actor’s dark, shining saucer eyes a gift — in other roles he is often either troubled, or trouble, and here it’s the former, those eyes pleading and afraid. As Adam reconnects with his parents, who seem very much alive as he returns to the house he grew up in, conversations pick at unresolved issues. He gets to come out to ghosts. It’s… complicated. Meanwhile, he finds solace in Harry, a charismatic, confident mess, a scuzzy saviour who might, maybe, be able to help Adam come to terms with himself. Their scenes are raw and honest and sensual, Scott and Mescal’s chemistry truly magical.
Haigh takes inspiration from a 1987 Taichi Yamada novel, but turns it into something that feels intensely autobiographical. It is steeped in romance: shot on film, it is beautiful inside and out, with heavenly scene transitions, and lighting like it’s almost perpetually golden hour. There is cosmic grandeur at play. Still, barely a minute goes by where you don’t feel some sort of pain. You want to be there with these two young men forever. Because they need each other. A mutual lifeline.
It’s hard to think of another recent drama that feels so brazenly personal, so yearning, so naked and vulnerable. It feels like forgiveness, for Haigh himself, and maybe for others. He’s letting it all out. These characters are a lifeline for him, too.
