All of Us Stranges
By Anne Gregg
Spoilers for All of Us Strangers
“If I’m lonely it’s not because I’m gay, not really.”
What if you were able to talk to a dead loved one again? What would you say? And if they didn’t know that you were queer, would you tell them?
All of Us Strangers is a dreamy ghost story about love, death, and healing the loneliness wrapped around broken hearts. The film, written and directed by Andrew Haigh, stars Andrew Scott as Adam, a Gen X screenwriter trying to write about his parents who died in a car crash when he was 12 years old, and Paul Mescal as Harry, a queer millennial with an addiction to drugs and alcohol. Adam and Harry are the only occupants of a new apartment building in London. One night, after a false fire alarm, Harry visits Adam at his apartment and flirts with him. He asks if Adam would like a drink. Adam reluctantly denies his request. The next day, Adam visits his childhood home and miraculously finds his parents there, just the way he remembers them, unchanged from the 80s.
Adam, who is now a little older than his parents were at the time of their death, is a stranger. He has lived most of his life without his parents, but he never was able to heal the hole in his heart that formed when they died. Their reunion is not overcome with emotions, rather, Adam’s parents greet him as if he is visiting from college. The moment isn’t grand. Choosing to forgo the emotional reunion where Adam says something along the lines of “but you’re dead” shifts the focus away from the moment of their death. It does not matter that they are dead, it matters that Adam has a chance to see them again. He does not question their existence, instead they question him. They want to know about his life, where he’s been, because they haven’t changed.
Adam immediately falls into acting like a kid again. His parents are still his parents, he will always see them as older than him, even if they are frozen in time. During a visit to his childhood home, Adam’s mom asks if he has a girlfriend, and Adam has to explain to his mother that he’s gay. His mother is shocked to find out that he is queer and he is surprised that she never suspected it. In Adam’s childhood bedroom, the camera catches an image of an all male rock band and a muscled action figure before focusing on a close up of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s debut record Welcome To The Pleasuredome. All of these things reflect Adam’s queerness when he was younger. We learn later that Adam was the subject of homophobic bullying at his school. Adam was lonely even when his parents were alive. His queerness made him feel isolated, and his parents died before he could come out to them, before he could be himself around the people who loved him unconditionally. His parents died never knowing him, never seeing him.
Loneliness is pervasive in All of Us Strangers. Adam’s apartment is high above the world. He is often shot from far away, framed by a doorway that places the audience in a different room peaking in. When he is in small spaces like the elevator of his building, he is framed in a mirror, being reflected over and over again, making the small space seem endless. The world of All of Us Strangers feels devoid of other people. Emboldened from visiting his parents house, he opens himself up more to Harry, and the two begin a relationship. People besides Harry and Adam’s parents begin to populate the film. Adam has been lonely his whole life, he has shut himself off from others, afraid of love. Speaking to his parents’ ghosts allows him to heal. When he finally opens up to his parents and receives their unconditional love, he gains the strength to accept his sexuality and open himself up to love. He overcomes his isolation by reuniting with his parents and by embracing his sexuality.
Adam is not lonely because he is gay. He is lonely because he was never able to fully open up to someone. After his parents died, he became scared of being known. This is tied to his sexuality, yes, but it is also rooted in their death and not being able to resolve his childhood trauma.
The world of All of Us Strangers is a dream. Its mix of beautiful yellows and oranges with cold blues, creates this strange world that is cold and distant while simultaneously being impossibly warm. It’s the colors of a bittersweet past and the melancholy of entering a good memory from long ago. Adam drifts through time and space through trains, the world behind him blurring into him. The passage of time means nothing. Love is everything. The final act of All of Us Strangers reveals that Harry is a ghost, he died after his first meeting with Adam and has been visiting him ever since. Rather than this realization ending with Harry disappearing forever and Adam feeling truly alone, it ends in them holding each other. It ends in love. The film lives in a liminal space outside the boundary of life and death. It does not matter that Harry is dead. It matters that someone found him. It matters that someone loves him.
All Of Us Strangers is a heartbreaking film that will make you feel sad and warm. All of Us Strangers is about sexuality, trauma, and getting lost in memory. It’s about childhood. It is not about life and death. It’s about healing and love. It does not matter what time and place the characters are in, if they are alive or dead. The only thing that matters is love.
About the Author
Anne Gregg is a poet and writer from Northwest Indiana. She is an English Writing major at DePauw University and is the editor-in-chief of her campus’s literary magazine, A Midwestern Review. She is a Media Fellow at her university and loves dissecting how LGBTQ+ people are portrayed in film and tv.
