‘All of Us Strangers’ Is About the Power of a Perfect Needledrop
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“All of Us Strangers” is praised for its wistful same-sex romance, but writer/director Andrew Haigh also credits Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Pet Shop Boys. In fact, he wouldn’t start production until he knew the film had the music rights.
“I think almost every single song that comes out was scripted,” he told IndieWire. “I knew what that music was before I even started, and I made sure we got the rights to it before we started. Everything was sort of designed with that in mind. [The movie] is about the power of music, weirdly, to drag us back into the past.”
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For Adam (Andrew Scott), the songs he chooses to play are as telling as the eerie silence that fills his apartment building, empty save for his neighbor and soon-to-be lover, Harry (Paul Mescal). Their relationship ends with a gut punch, but the final, devastating moment finds them embracing in bed for the last time as Adam begins whispering. “I’ll protect you from the hooded claw. Keep the vampires from your door,” Scott says, as Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “The Power of Love” overtakes the soundtrack.
“I remember buying, when I was a kid, the Frankie Goes to Hollywood album and listening to ‘The Power of Love’ over and over again,” Haigh said. “Now, I’m 10 years old, and I didn’t really understand what that even means, necessarily. But I knew there was something that spoke to my queer self. There was some grand, operatic longing to the song that made me want to reach out to the fucking stars. Like, I can have love one day, I hope, but maybe I can’t. And so when I was writing the film I was like, ‘You know what? I want to go back to that kid, when I didn’t think love was ever gonna be possible in any way, shape, or form.”
Haigh also leverages the song’s cultural history to underscore the tragedy of Adam, a gay man who came of age during the AIDS crisis, lived through the deaths of his parents at an early age, and finds the concept of permanence elusive even while he longs for the kind of operatic, all-consuming love that the song conveys. For Adam, as for many in the audience, music is both a balm and a gateway to memory. And nowhere is it more powerfully both than in the songs he listens to with the ghosts of his parents, played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy.
Forced to come out to his mother’s ghost — who does not react with the hoped-for calm of a 21st-century parent — Adam finds himself on the verge of losing her again. But in a bravura sequence, he experiences another Christmas as both his adult self and the little boy he was, wearing footie pajamas and decorating a Christmas tree with his mother and father.
Things are still icy until Foy starts to quietly sing along to the song playing in the background: “Always on My Mind.”
“I remember writing that scene, and I was like, ‘Oh Jesus, not only is it an adult in tiny pajamas decorating a Christmas tree, with his parents, they are singing along to Pet Shop Boys,'” Haigh said. The scene works because the three actors are so committed to the emotion, but also because the choice of cover is quintessentially as English as the repressed emotion. “There’s that beautiful moment where she starts very softly singing and they all join in. It’s so much easier in many ways to deal with your family through a shared song,” Haigh said. “The lines are, ‘Maybe I didn’t hold you all those lonely, lonely times.’ It’s such a beautiful lyric, and it sums up everything that Adam wished. And it’s so English, as well, to me because we’re never very good at saying what we think, but we are very good at expressing ourselves in other ways.”
Haigh stayed nervous about whether or not the scene would work even while filming it, but by the time they finished, he knew that the emotion (and song) carried the day. “Some of the crew were crying, and had tears in their eyes,” he said. “When she sings those lyrics, it literally says every single thing he wants to hear in that moment. It’s a really lovely emotional moment, and sort of ridiculous and absurd at the same time.”
That’s an equally powerful summation of love — and of pop music.
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