Few directors today are a better purveyor of human devastation than Andrew Haigh, and yet, his films are never bleak and never give way to sorrow. His movies and TV shows go about it in different ways, but they all usually come back to the limits of humanity and our outsized capacity to disappoint one another. Nothing haunts us like the past, and the present is just a perpetual reclamation project. His latest film, All of Us Strangers, is part romance, part family drama, part metaphysical metaphor. Surrounding it all is a soundtrack of deep cut UK hits of the 80s and 90s. If you think this all sounds ridiculous, I don’t blame you, but Haigh weaves this into a shattering tale of loneliness, grief, and reflection. It’s a ghost story, sure, but it’s also an incredible tale about memory told in a way I’ve never seen before.

The script is based on the 1987 Japanese novel Strangers, but Haigh has claimed that this is the most personal movie that he’s ever made. This speaks to the rigorous labor of adaptation. Adam (an absolutely stunning Andrew Scott) is a screenwriter living in a sleek high-rise within a quiet, industrial, unnamed part of England. He’s working on a screenplay about his parents who died in a car crash when he was 12 years old. They didn’t live long enough to learn that Adam is a gay man. They were struck down in the 80s, the time of AIDS and Thatcher’s Section 28 laws. And so, his grief over their loss, even decades later, is mixed with a paralyzing fear of their rejection of his lifestyle. Times have changed, and his parents may have proven to change with them, but the lack of certainty leaves a permanent knot in the center of his heart.

Strangers alternates between two of Adam’s relationships. The first is pretty straightforward: he begins a love affair with Harry (Paul Mescal), a younger man who appears to be the only other person living in his building. Harry is an emotionally generous partner, who instinctively responds to Adam’s innate nerviness. Harry has come of age in a more accepting time, but he can still comprehend Adam’s trauma, and provides requisite support. The second relationship is more complicated: when Adam visits his childhood home outside of the city, he finds himself meeting his father (Jamie Bell) and mother (Claire Foy), still living in the house, still the same age they were when they died. Their reintroduction is without fanfare or explanation, and Adam is quick to revert back to a childlike state, watching his parents cavort around the house like little has changed.

The film is mostly coy on the more supernatural elements. Haigh’s script is so thoroughly within Adam’s headspace, one may wonder if this is all a product of madness, the act of memory and re-creation taking on a life of its own. A more insecure film may have eventually pulled the trigger on a more absolute clarification, but Strangers prefers to exist within the limbo of magical realism. Adam’s visits to his parents is equal parts painful and therapeutic, their conversations quickly turning into litigations of his life in the present and their parenting in the past. When they finally do discuss his sexuality, his fears are both confirmed and assuaged. They’re less disappointed and more afraid of how their child can cope in a world that doesn’t usually accept cultural outliers.

These complicated meetings reflect themselves in his moments with Harry, who has his own complicated relationship with his parents. Adam doesn’t really understand the younger generation, the confidence of their pride doesn’t measure up to the perpetual fear of his adolescence. Adam is in the midst of a deep excavation of his family, where Harry seems almost comfortable with his parents’ alleged indifference. As much as Strangers is evasive in explaining how the ghosts of Adam’s parents find themselves back in his life, the character of Harry proves equally enigmatic. It’s hard on first watch to really decipher what is real, if at all, but Haigh pulls a fast one with Harry, revealing him to be harboring hidden feelings that we (and more importantly, Adam) fail to see.

This movie is a shattering emotional experience. The script’s aching sincerity runs the risk of spinning off into the maudlin, but Haigh expertly puts the tears in all the right places. Scott’s performance – the best of his career – is the key to this. The Irish actor gives us a character that is equal parts sympathetic and solipsistic, shy and modest but still completely engulfed by the damage of his history. Haigh views the mourning at the center of this film as a lifelong process, and the act of separating it from your day-to-day life as a fool’s errand. The depth of loss here is immeasurable but Strangers is good at showing us the appreciation that can come with heartbreak. As much as the movie courts the audience’s sobs, it does so more with sudden understanding than with unquestioned misery.

With the exception of a club scene in the middle of the film (set to a perfect Blur needle drop), the film’s cast is made entirely of its four characters. Scott’s brilliance goes without saying, while Mescal’s elusive, ultimately devastating performance is key. As the surprisingly thoughtful father, Bell ends up being the center of the film’s more tearjerking moments. It’s Foy, as Adam’s mother, who proves to be the actor as consequential as Scott. Their dialogues, filled first with unspoken tension and then later with unexpected perception, are the best scenes in the movie. The nature of their dynamic – he’s now older but her maternal power still possesses him completely – never feels bizarre or uncanny. This is a testament to the degree of execution that Haigh presents here.

All of Us Strangers takes something with such a high degree of difficulty and delivers it with such a modest, sensitive style. You’d think that would undermine the invention of what Haigh’s doing, but in fact the opposite is true. I don’t know if I like every storytelling decision made here, but there’s no denying that it comes from a singular vision that no one else could have brought to light. What is easy to say is that the performances, especially from Scott and Foy, are some of the very best you will see this year. A perfect illustration of character complexity posing as melodrama. Strangers enjoys being an emotional experience first, a choice that too many movies avoid in the name of contemporary cynicism. It’s unafraid to break your heart, which it does without malice, but also without mercy.

 

Written for the Screen and Directed by Andrew Haigh