Romance

Film review of director Andrew Haigh’s film about a gay screenwriter who enters into a relationship with a mysterious man as he finds out his supposedly dead parents are alive.

To like this post, comment on it or follow this blog, please scroll to the bottom. Use the search function on the left of the screen to look for other reviews and updates.

Synopsis

Adam (Andrew Scott) is a reserved gay writer living in London, traumatised by the death of his parents in a car accident when he was a boy.

One night, after a fire alarm, his younger neighbour Harry (Paul Mescal) drunkenly makes a pass, which Adam awkwardly rebuffs.

Slowly, these two lonely men become closer and form a relationship that will have profound, tragic consequences.

Review by Jason Day

!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!

It’s not often I write about movies in the first person, but then it’s not often a movie moves me to the point where I have the sensation of myself on the big screen.

I’m passionate about film as anyone who knows me knows, anything from silent cinema, MGM romances, zombie horrors and disaster dramas, yes even the bad ones, get two thumbs up.

‘Lavender cinema’ is not high on my list of cinematic preferences. I’ve always been left underwhelmed by them, as if there’s too much of what I know on the screen and little to no mystery.

I don’t ordinarily see these films at the multiplex – admittedly, they don’t often get a look in with so many DC/Marvel ‘bollox cinema’ flicks clogging up the schedule – so would hardly see ‘me’ writ large. All of Us Strangers bucks the trend. Watching it was a humbling, moving, sometimes jarring experience. It’s a stunning film.

As a gay man who came out – rather clumsily, as Andrew Scott’s Adam does – and moved to London with my original view to becoming a published writer like the main character, there were striking parallels (and yes, I went to The Royal Vauxhall Tavern where Adam and Harry have their first official date).

Adam and Harry (Paul Mescal) are lonely planetoids hurtling through space until they finally collide. There are astronomical visuals throughout. The moon rises and falls and has a pinkish hue, the lights of the London cityscape resemble the cosmos…and there is the ending.

Initially, I felt that this conclusion was frustrating and cold. Of all the lovers in modern-day cinema, surely traumatised Adam and neglected Harry deserved to waltz into the sunset?

But Haigh doesn’t let me or you off easily. Just at the point that he finds true love, Harry takes his own life and, as represented by the image of two stars twinkling in the firmament – slowly revealed to be just two amongst thousands of others – grief-stricken Adam does the same.

I wanted these two misbegotten men to live a happily married life like Adam’s adoring parents, but seconds after the closing credits rolled and dumbstruck at what I’d seen, I realised this is the happiest ending for Adam and Harry. Visually, Haigh has joined them forever. There’s no more pain, just perpetual partnership.

In real life Scott is gay, Mescal is straight and the two are firm friends, which makes the believability and rawness of their sex scenes incredible. These moments – intimate and emotional, rather than pornographic – also show the importance of intimacy coordinators – in this case, Lucy Fennell – on set.

Fennell, Haigh and editor Jonathan Alberts and the off screen co. conjure up a world where Scott and Mescal, two highly skilled actors, can relax and create believable, emotionally scarred characters needing stability and love. 

Scott delicately, devastatingly brings out the Adam’s vulnerability and Mescal – with a lovely, dreamy and light northern accent – has the air of a tragic poet.

I’m not ashamed to admit this, but I cried during this film. Movies don’t always make me well up, but this one did, with a full on teary torrent at the end.

To close, I return to that coming out scene in which Adam awkwardly goes through the gay rights tick list with his mum (a brilliant Claire Foy, impish in support as the just out of reach parent, as is Jamie Bell as Adam’s plain speaking father). This is done in her kitchen over a meticulously prepared cuppa, rather than one of the elevators at the Clock Towers Shopping Centre in my hometown Rugby, but it elicits the same concerned reaction as my mother had…when we met up an hour later after the big news had settled.

There can be no more devastating, symbolic declaration of how upset an English woman is than when she chucks a cup of tea down the sink, as Foy does so expertly. Followed with: “You can take the flapjacks with you”, her son knows that the conversation is over and exactly how disappointed she is. To anyone outside Britain, that will seem like nonsense.

For me, it was another reminder of how redolent All of Us Strangers is. Thank you, Andrew Haigh, for renewing my faith in gay cinema…and myself.

For more, see the official website.

Cast & credits

Director: Andrew Haigh. Blueprint Pictures/Film4/Searchlight Pictures. 1h 45/105 mins. (15).

Producers: Graham Broadbent, Peter Czernin, Sarah Harvey.
Writers: Andrew Haigh.
Camera: Jamie Ramsay.
Music: Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch.
Sets: Sarah Finlay.

Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Carter John Grout, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy, Ami Tredrea.