‘All of Us Strangers’: the beautiful intimacy of a romantic nightmare, starring Paul Mescal

The real story of this movie is told by Andrew Scott’s dejected face. When set before a more-or-less certain and phantasmal present, the character, played by the formidable Irish actor, becomes a little boy rendered glum and puzzled by a time not his own. Such was the natural order for people who thought differently, and were excited by that which was still unspeakable in most societies. Like many other 1980s teenagers in the United Kingdom, where All of Us Strangers takes place, the young man was loved deeply by his family. But his parents didn’t know how to recognize or confront his weak demeanor, his nocturnal sobs, his musical tastes, his silence. And he became a solitary, creative and wary adult. A stranger, perhaps.

Inspired by the novel Strangers, published by the Japanese author Taichi Yamada in 1987, and made into a film adaptation — Nobuhiko Obayashi’s The Discarnates (1988) — in All of Us Strangers, British filmmaker Andrew Haigh has crafted a painful and unrelenting, romantic and reflective, but above all, mysterious film about love: the familiar, the sentimental, the sexual. It’s an overwhelmingly stylized work about an encounter and a reencounter. There is an encounter with a neighbor in a massive and apocalyptic recently-built London building, one that seems to have been plucked from a J.G. Ballard novel, and which only the two main characters seem to inhabit, each in their own apartment; a place devoid of realism, as is the film itself, a symbol of both men’s loneliness. There’s a reencounter with parents who want to embrace and share, remember and celebrate. Even amidst the grief of death.

All of Us Strangers is a film based on the value of its interpretations, and on its eerie sense of uneasiness within an apparently calm plot. Although perhaps, it is the other way around: A commotion arrived at through shapes. Through Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s enveloping soundtrack made up of festive, sad, generation-specific songs featuring Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Pet Shop Boys and The Housemartins; through the spectral design of its tortuous interiors; through its phantasmagoric lighting; through its resounding colors.

Haigh, who directed the excellent Weekend (2011) and 45 Years (2015), with which All of Us Strangers shares much of its romantic ecstasy and conceptual reflection on the true nature of desire and affection, utilizes perhaps unconsciously (one would have to ask him) some of the narrative formulas of the best of Carlos Saura from the 1970s, that of Cousin Angelica, The Garden of Delights and Cria Cuervos. All feature impossible meetings of human beings in different times and even universes.

The protagonist has arrived to his promised land (cue Joe Smooth’s track Promised Land, a late-1980s house classic) thanks to the tolerant society of a contemporary era in which homosexual love need no longer be relegated to the shadows. Nonetheless, the burden of the past, of bewilderment and depression, still weighs too heavily. Scott and Mescal, the latter the priest from Fleabag and the father from Aftersun, have it written all over their faces. And their performances, along with those of Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, round out a fascinating film. One will remember the sequence of their meeting at the door of Scott’s apartment, its conversation’s leisurely tempo and exchange of looks between two acting heavyweights, for a long time to come.

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