Andrew Haigh’s All Of Us Strangers, based on the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, was one of my most anticipated films of 2024. The brilliant Andrew Scott stars as the lonely Adam who visits his unoccupied childhood home and finds his parents, who died in a car accident when he was twelve, seemingly alive. Paul Mescal co-stars as Harry, a man who Adam is starting a relationship with and who has his own feelings of distance from his family.
This is mostly a stunning achievement, the sort of film that stays with you for days afterwards, thanks for the acting, Haigh’s insightful script and Jamie Ramsay’s dreamlike cinematography. Scott is superb: he is able to portray vulnerability with a look or gesture. There is one particular scene involving him and Jamie Bell, who is great as his Dad, that was particularly devastating. The revelation towards the end is a real gut punch and the last scene transcendental.
The only quibble I have is with the prolonged sex scenes involving Adam and Harry. It is not because they are gay, I would have felt the same way if they were heterosexual scenes. It is because they add nothing more to the story that just knowing that they had sex would have done.
Rating: 9 out of 10