All Of Us Strangers

 

The less one knows about Andrew Haigh's beautiful and quietly devastating film All of Us Strangers the better. It's a small, intimate picture about loss and recovery that must be heard as much as seen with one's guard down. 

Adam (Andrew Scott) lives in near isolation in a London high-rise, trying to write a screenplay about his parents, who died in an accident when he was a boy. Andrew gets the notion to visit his childhood home and while there encounters his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy), living in a world suspended between the past and present. He begins regular visits. 

Around the same time, a friendly neighbor (Paul Mescal) comes to Adam's flat one night with a bottle of whiskey and a sexual proposition. Adam declines at first but then ventures out and they begin an affair.

These events are linked, and the beauty of Haigh's film is the way it reveals how and what they tell us about Adam. The answers are unexpected.

The screenplay, based on a novel by Taichi Yamada, is exquisite in its intelligence and honesty. Each performance by the small cast of principals is deeply moving, with Scott's slow burn as an isolated man learning, perhaps for the first time, the power of love the most gripping.