Let’s Close-Read the Most Mysterious Movie Ending of the Year

This article contains spoilers for All of Us Strangers.

There might be no plot twist more played-out or predictable than the revelation that a character was dead the whole time—just reading through the examples on TV Tropes’ “Dead All Along” page could eat up an entire day. But Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers keeps an eventually devastating surprise under wraps by pretending it’s one ghost story when it’s actually two.

Adam (Andrew Scott) is a solitary and creatively blocked screenwriter who lives in a nearly deserted apartment building on the outskirts of London. In search of inspiration, he makes a pilgrimage to his childhood home, where he encounters his parents—a bit of a surprise, since they died in a car crash when he was 12. After getting over the initial shock, Adam sets himself to cleaning up unfinished business, including coming out to the mother (Claire Foy) and father (Jamie Bell) he never had a chance to tell he was gay. Meanwhile, he is entering in a relationship with Harry (Paul Mescal), the only other person in his building, who turns up at Adam’s door one night with a bottle of whiskey and becomes his lover. As Adam works through his parental issues, his intimacy with Harry grows apace. But at the movie’s end, it’s revealed that Harry, too, has been dead for quite a while, if not as long as Adam’s parents. Entering Harry’s apartment for the first time, Adam is overwhelmed by the smell of decay, and finds Harry’s body rotting in bed.

Harry hasn’t been dead the whole time, though, just most of it. Watch closely, and there are definitive cues about exactly when Adam enters into each of his fantasies, even if the hints are so subtle they’re all but impossible to grasp on first viewing. With his parents, the dividing line is simple enough: It’s the moment we see him open up a fresh document and type the words “EXT. SUBURBAN HOUSE 1987.” But even there, Haigh initially blurs the lines. He deliberately stages the reappearance of Adam’s father in a way that suggests he’s being cruised rather than reuniting with a long-gone parent. Adam’s dad (he’s never named) appears in the distance, beckons him with a silent nod, and then picks up a bottle of booze before inviting Adam back to his house—the stunned look on Adam’s face suggesting he’s not the kind of person this usually happens to. It’s only when the door opens to reveal a woman who greets Adam with a familiar smile that you start to realize there’s something else going on.

The phantom version of Harry makes a similar entrance, introduced by another shot of Adam at his laptop—although this time, we don’t get a peek at what he’s writing. But unless you believe the entire movie is a dream (we’ll circle back to that possibility later), the imaginary Harry is not the only one. The moment Harry turns up at Adam’s door with a bottle of whiskey and the offer of sex precedes Adam opening his laptop, as does the awkward encounter in the lobby that follows it. Turning up at Adam’s door with the bottle he’s offering to share already half-drunk, Harry seems every bit as starved for human connection as Adam is, but Adam is repelled by his forthrightness and shuts the door in his face. It’s a panic reaction, and Adam regrets it instantly, pressing his hand against the closed door as if he can feel Harry lingering on the other side. So when they re-encounter each other in the building, Adam tries to make up for his curtness: Maybe we could have that drink after all. But Harry doesn’t say a word, and lets the elevator doors shut on their conversation—he’s laid himself bare once, and isn’t going to make the mistake of doing it again. That, we later come to understand, is the last time both men see each other alive.

Since his parents’ death, Adam has lived with the regret that he never said to them all the things he wished he had, and he sets about repairing that hurt in the way he knows best: He tells a story. He’s a good, or at least honest, enough writer that the conversations he imagines with them aren’t just wish-fulfillment. When he comes out to his parents, it goes about as well as you might expect for a small-town family in the late 1980s. His mother is confused and a bit put off, channeling her concerns into a fixation on the “very lonely kind of life” her son has chosen. (Adam counters that he may be lonely, but it’s not because he’s gay.) Adam’s father takes the news somewhat better at first—he always knew, he says, because Adam was hopeless at throwing a ball. But when Adam presses him on why, if he knew, he never said anything—all those times he heard his son sobbing in his room and never once knocked on the door—his father admits he’s not so different than the children who picked on Adam at school. At that age, his father says, he might well have done the same thing.

As far as Adam knows when he starts writing, Harry is just a cute guy he’s blown his chance with, but he creates a fictional version to tell himself a different kind of story, working out what it means to be a gay man on the cusp of his 50s, faced with a lover roughly half his age. Adam flinches a little when Harry asks if he’s queer, because it rings of the homophobic taunts of his formative years, but Harry doesn’t like being called gay, having grown up in an era where the word served as an all-purpose insult. (“Those trainers are gay … that sofa’s gay.”) Adam, who came of age at the peak of the AIDS crisis, is wary of penetrative sex. Harry, 20 years younger, is happy to give or receive. Harry takes Adam to a pulsating dance club and gives him his first snort of ketamine. Adam dances the night away and wakes up screaming.

Andrew Haigh is working out issues of his own. The scenes in Adam’s childhood home were shot in the house Haigh grew up in, and Bell and Foy were cast in part because of their physical resemblance to Haigh’s real parents. The outlines of the movie’s plot come from Taichi Yamada’s novel Strangers, not from Haigh’s life—Haigh’s parents, for one thing, are still alive—but the book’s protagonist is a middle-aged straight man going through a painful divorce, and his ghostly lover is a woman with a horribly scarred chest. Haigh took the conceit of a man coming face to face with his past regrets and made it more specific to his own life. He told his parents he was gay a long time ago, but his father has severe dementia, so the writer-director found himself, at the age of 50, having to come out to his father for a second time. “I think there’s lots of things that I’m sort of throwing into this film about a child—which is still me—wanting to talk to his parents,” he told one interviewer.

Throughout the movie, the characters frequently appear in reflections, sometimes emerging from Adam’s silhouette as if they’re physically breaking off from him. Sometimes, they reverse the process and seem to merge into one being. There’s no getting around the fact that Harry and Adam’s father, with their solid physiques and brushy moustaches, resemble one another. Haigh even underlines that fact with a scene in which the adult Adam gets into bed between his parents. The camera moves to one side, so that only Adam and his mother are in the frame, and when it moves back, Bell has been replaced by Mescal, who grabs his shoulder and comes in for a kiss. “I’m trying to make these links between our sexuality, between our desire, between our need for love, and that comes from parental love,” Haigh told an interviewer. “No one is surprised when it turns out a straight dude has married someone that’s a bit like his mum. No one is surprised. But no one thinks, ‘Well, maybe gay men also end up going for someone that’s a bit like their dad … ’ These are not coincidences. We’ve set it up like that.” There’s even a hint of a sexual charge when a rain-soaked Adam disrobes in front of his mother and she takes a moment to size up his adult body before concluding that he’s not really her type. “I thought you’d be hairier, like your dad,” she says, pressing a hand to his smooth torso. “I like a hairy chest myself.” (The fact that Adam’s mother describes her ideal man with an adjective that echoes the name of Adam’s fantasy lover is almost a little too on-the-nose.)

In Yamada’s novel, visiting his dead parents seems to physically drain the protagonist, until he is so pale and haggard that he himself starts to look like a ghost. But what’s sapping his strength is actually the woman he’s been having the affair with, who killed herself after he rejected her. (The burn scars she claimed to have been hiding from him are actually self-inflicted stab wounds.) She’s resentful that he has carried on living and has been trying to drag him into death alongside her, but eventually she’s forced to admit that his despair is not as deep as her own, and she releases her grip. Harry, by contrast, is just a product of Adam’s imagination—the smell of rot in Harry’s apartment indicates that his body has been lying there a good long while. But the impact on him is no less than if the movie’s other characters had genuinely come back from beyond the grave. Adam breaks off one conversation with his mother to ask, “Is this real?” And she responds, “Does it feel real?” We know by then that, at least for him, it does.

Adam’s parents go quietly, fading away after one last family dinner. Harry’s parting is more painful. He reappears just after Adam finds his body, and although Harry can’t remember how he died, he knows from the look on Adam’s face that it wasn’t good. “I was so scared that night,” he says, wishing, like Adam, that things could have gone a different way. “I just needed to not be alone.” Adam too was scared, “too scared to let you in.” And while there’s no changing what’s already happened, All of Us Strangers writes them the happiest ending it can manage. The two men curl up in bed, Adam folding his body around Harry’s, and as Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “The Power of Love”—the song that was playing on the TV the night Harry came to Adam’s door—floods the soundtrack, the camera starts to pull away from them, their bedside lamps a warm glow in the darkness that surrounds. That glow dwindles to a pinprick of light, but then we see others appear, and we realize we’re gazing up at the night sky, and they’ve become one star in a constellation of loneliness.

One way to read the ending is that Adam, too, has died, joining Harry in the heavens. There is something almost purgatorial about the way Adam’s building looks out from a distance over the glowing heart of the city, as if he’s a lost soul with a few loose ends to tie up before he goes on to glory. (The fact Harry paraphrases the lyrics of “The Power of Love” during their first conversation could just mean he was listening through the door before he got up the courage to knock, or it could suggest that the entire movie takes place in Adam’s head.) Haigh has said the ambiguity is intentional: “It’s all the manifestation of a feeling, so if people see different things in that, they should.” But I don’t think it means to suggest that even the loneliest of us can only find communion in death. If Adam has brought back through his art the people he failed in life, it’s to teach himself a lesson: that the world is as full of people in pain as the sky is full of stars, and the path toward healing our own sorrow is to reach out to others in theirs. The song the movie uses to play us out tells us as much. “Dreams are like angels,” it goes. “They keep bad at bay. Love is the light, scaring darkness away.”