‘All of Us Strangers’: Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott’s Ghostly Love Story Will Break Your Heart

Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers has its share of mysteries and dreamscapes and detours into the mystical, but it drops a breadcrumb morsel of a clue to viewers early on. You don’t know it on a first viewing — and this is the sort of rich, layered, remarkable work of art that requires more than a few — yet the detail that the filmmaker momentarily fixates on is telling. Adam (Andrew Scott) is a screenwriter, struggling to start work on a project. He alternates between staring at a blank page and lounging on his couch, watching TV for hours on end. His apartment is in a London high-rise building that’s curiously empty. Even more curious: The only other occupant is Harry (Paul Mescal), the hot dude who lives a few floors down and has a strong liking for both whiskey and Adam, in that order. Yet when he comes a-knockin’ one evening, hoping to share a drink, the writer gently rebuffs him. Emotional and physical connections are not his forte.

When Adam finally does begin to pen a script, we get a quick glimpse of his opening setting: EXT. Suburban House 1987. This is Haigh’s gentle nudge to viewers, a quiet signal that we’re about to head into the past. It isn’t long after that shot that we ride shotgun with Adam as he boards a train and heads to his quiet hometown of Sanderstead. Walking around the village, he sees a handsome, mustachioed man (Jamie Bell) standing on the edge of the woods. He beckons to Adam, who smiles and follows, at a distance. You wonder if the two are cruising each other. Finally, at a corner store, he and the gent make small talk. Let’s go, the stranger finally says. Where, Adam asks. “Home.”

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Feel free to stop here if you’d like to go into All of Us Strangers cold (and maybe avoid watching that trailer below as well). But it doesn’t ruin the experience to know that when this man refers to “home,” he means their home. It’s Adam’s father, even though he somehow seems to be younger than the writer. So, for that matter, does Adam’s mom (The Crown‘s Claire Foy). Both are in their early thirties, with a wardrobe that suggests Margaret Thatcher is still Prime Minister. Adam, for his part, is ecstatic to talk to both of them. When he leaves, they tell him to drop by any time. And it isn’t until Adam happens to mention to Harry a few scenes later, almost in passing, that his parents died in a car accident when he was 12 that you recall the locale and date at the top of his script….

You can categorize Haigh’s film as both a ghost story and a love story, with the latter description becoming apparent once the two men give in to their desire for each other. Yet the parallel tracks that the British writer-director runs this beautiful tale of heartbreak and healing are both heading to the same destination, and they soon intertwine in a way that convinces you one can’t fully work without the other. Haigh’s 2011 indie debut Weekend charted how a one-night stand between two men slowly, almost accidentally evolves into something deeper. And like that talky, swoonworthy romance, All of Us Strangers offers an intimate view of gay life that feels unique, and uniquely sensitive, even in the year of our lord 2023. The sex scenes between the actors have more than their share of heat thanks to the chemistry between these performers, but it’s the extraordinary tenderness between these characters that makes you feel like a voyeur. Harry tempers his lust with a gentleness and generosity toward his new crush. As for Adam, he’s simply responding to being touched at all — an experience that seems both foreign and ultimately freeing to him.

Yet it’s Haigh’s sophomore film, the brilliant and shattering 45 Years (2015), that may offer more of a map for the territory this movie is heading toward. That drama revolved around a decades-old trauma that crept into the present as a married couple celebrated a milestone anniversary. And for Adam, the original sin of his parents’ untimely demise is what has kept him from having any chance for an emotional connection with anybody. It’s the pivotal point of his relationship with the entire world. Having finally had the chance to have conversations with his mother and father, spectral or otherwise, that he was never able to have before, this somewhat reclusive creative type finally begins to unburden himself.

Not that these years-in-the-making chats go smoothly or according to anything resembling a plan on Adam’s part. His coming out to his mother ends with her confused, disbelieving, and concerned “about that disease I saw on the news”; he immediately becomes defensive and hurt. Later, his father begins to apologize for how his latent, or perhaps not-so-latent, homophobia might have wounded the young Adam, causing the adult Adam to tear up. The way that Scott, Foy and Bell play these sequences hit home, in every sense of the phrase. And the manner in which Scott toggles between being a grown man in their presence and quietly morphing into the 12-year-old he was when he last saw them gives every one of their interactions a profound emotional wallop. Most of us tend to revert back to our childhood selves if we’re lucky enough to return to the scene of our original familial crimes and misdemeanors. Not all of us find ourselves in the same pajamas we used to wear, crawling into our parents’ bed for a late-night heart to heart.

Scott, it should be said, is the key to All of Us Strangers coming together in a cohesive, and eventually devastating way — let’s just say that there’s more than one tragedy involved in this winding Möbius strip of a narrative. The manner in which the Sherlock/Fleabag actor moves through the various time trips and memory-lane strolls, some of which are more painful and raw than others, manages to keep Haigh’s occasional flights of paranormal fancy solidly on terra firma. There’s not a bad performance among the central quartet here (Mescal once again proves that he’s a character actor stuck with a matinee idol’s square-jawed mug), but Scott is the one subtly shouldering the storytelling. Even if you’ve seen his theater work or some of his deeper cuts on British TV, his work in this moving tale about the power of love still feels like a revelation.

Speaking of “The Power of Love”: Haigh ends the movie on that vintage Frankie Goes to Hollywood cut, as well as taking a risk by exiting on what can only be called a moment of celestial ecstasy. Like that hidden-in-plain-sight cue in Adam’s work-in-progress script, it’s the sort of thing that only feels more resonant the more you return to the film. All of Us Strangers suggests by its title that trying to truly know your fellow humans — be they lovers, family members, or memories somehow made manifest — is to dream the impossible dream. By the time the credits roll, the movie has contradicted itself in the profoundest of ways. It’s not impossible it all. Such attempts may be the only thing that matters in the end.

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