Warning: The first paragraph contains no spoilers and then the rest of the review is straight talk.
All of Us Strangers is an Andrew Haigh film (45 Years, Lean on Pete) which he adapted from a novel by Taichi Yamada.
The film has received 3 BAFTA Awards (film, screenplay director) and rightly so. Though I can’t give the film a perfect score since I believe it suffers from two problems: 1. Ferrarism, a new term I’ve invented for too slow a start to a film. I get Haigh wants to paint the picture of our main character, brilliantly portrayed by Andrew Scott, as living a lonely quiet life, but I don’t need to experience this in real time. Get the story off the ground, not speedingly, but at least moving.
And 2. The film also has the plight of living up to the hype, as I felt with last year’s After Sun. Sometimes big press makes us want too much upon viewing.
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WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW
All of Us Strangers has beautiful moments (never have I seen two men kiss-Andrew Scott’s partner here is Paul Mescal-in such a romantic way). It’s an atmospheric kiss in a nightclub scene where the light shines through them and was drop dead gorgeous.
I also truly enjoyed the pillow talk which evoked memories and a mini epiphany. In the adult world, pillow talk, where two souls share intimate thoughts on the horizontal, is far more important as afterplay than foreplay. Scott shares these moments not only with his lover, but also his parents. Those scenes brought back Sunday morning memories of my childhood. Even with childhood friends, who doesn’t have great slumber party memories with friends, giggling and talking in sleeping bags way past our bedtimes?
There were more moments between Scott and his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) that were poignant, the only problem being that there seemed to be such melancholic understatement to it all, that the momentum was diminished.
Since Scott’s character lost his parents when he was 12, he still possessed a more halcyon view of his parents and family life. Had they lived longer and he had that re-adjustment of attitude most of us have toward our parents, a balanced realism to the mistakes and great work they did, he wouldn’t have had such a need to fill in the blanks. That’s not a slight, in fact it’s a boon to the screenplay.
So as much as I admired the script’s premise (what if we got to tell our deceased loved ones what we did not say in life?), I seem to be an extreme pragmatist when it comes to life and death. But here’s my deal: we are put on this Earth for a very short time. We need to practice our best health and love the people we connect with deeply, knowing those connections aren’t just happenstance, but truly uniquely precious, yet also realize that it is because we’re mortal that every moment is important. It’s on you if you screw that up. No amount of mourning someone’s passing, or what you did or did not say, will ever correct the past nor bring them back. Gather ye roses while ye may, as the famous poet Robert Herrick once warned.
But I digress, the movie ends in my opinion as a large fever dream, and if we take it as this, Scott suffers from not following my advice above. If his relationship with Paul Mescal DID happen, then his character makes the large mistake of discounting a huge present connection right in front of him to the impossible task of ‘healing the wounds of the past’. If Paul Mescal kills himself after Scott rejects him on first meeting and the entire film are just Scott’s fantasies, then I feel a bit cheated not to know what part was dream and what was reality. Still, I appreciated the film’s reach and beautiful performances.
