Andrew Haigh (2023)
Kristy Matheson, BFI’s new festivals director, introduced this European premiere of All of Us Strangers. She promised that the protagonists of writer-director Andrew Haigh’s latest were ‘the sexiest couple’ we would see at this year’s London Film Festival – cue whooping and applause from the Royal Festival Hall audience. This member of it couldn’t help thinking Matheson wouldn’t have said this if the lovers in question had been a woman and a man, or two women; I wondered what made the remark less prurient when applied to a gay male pairing. Matheson also suggested that All of Us Strangers was one of the best films we would see not just this year but in our lifetime. Follow that … Haigh’s drama couldn’t although parts of it are very good indeed.
Forty-something Adam (Andrew Scott) sprawls on the sofa in his flat, eating biscuits and watching television – doing both automatically. Adam lives alone, on one of the topmost floors of a London high-rise. He opens the door one night to a younger man he recognises as another resident of the building: this is Harry (Paul Mescal), who’s carrying a bottle of Japanese whisky and wonders if Adam fancies a drink. When the offer is declined, Harry asks if there’s anything else Adam might like him to come in for. After some hesitation, the answer is still no and the door is closed. Adam is writing a screenplay or, at any rate, beginning one – with ‘Ext: suburban house – 1987’. Cut to him on a train journey. Arrived at his destination, he walks down a suburban street and stops by a house, which he compares with the house in a photograph he has with him. He wanders out into fields and sees in the middle distance another man, who seems to encourage Adam to follow him, which Adam does – back onto a street, towards a convenience store. The man (Jamie Bell) appears to recognise Adam and suggests they head for a house where a woman (Claire Foy) opens the door and welcomes Adam in. It’s soon clear from the conversation that Adam is her and the man’s son. Yet he’s older than them.
Kristy Matheson eventually got round to welcoming to the RFH stage Andrew Haigh and Sarah Harvey, one of the film’s producers. If Harvey hadn’t explained the source material for Haigh’s screenplay I would have guessed it was a stage play but I’d have been wrong. All of Us Strangers has a small cast – it’s virtually a four-hander. The ease with which Adam moves between the present and a singular hybrid of present and past also suggests theatrical origins – so does the sequencing of scenes involving him and his parents. After their first reunion, Adam returns to his childhood home (in Sanderstead, South Croydon) to talk first with just his mother, then with just his father – allowing all three characters to say their piece with minimal opposition, as they might on stage. In fact, though, the screenplay is based on a novel, Strangers by Taichi Yamada, first published in 1987 and which Sarah Harvey described as ‘a Japanese ghost story’. (All of Us Strangers is the second cinema adaptation of the novel, following Nobuhiko Obayashi’s The Discarnates (1988).) Adam and his parents resume as a screen trio for the later parts of one half of Haigh’s story. In the other half, back in London, Adam lets Harry into his flat and his life, and a sexual relationship develops between them.
Adam’s family home is unchanged from 1987; Mum and Dad (who are otherwise unnamed) look and dress as they might have done then. We learn that this was the year they died, in a car crash returning from a Christmas party, when their only child wasn’t quite twelve. (Adam then went to live with his maternal grandmother.) Although they know they died and realise Adam is thirty-odd years older than when they last saw him, his parents aren’t otherwise au fait with what’s happened to him or the world since they left it – that, for example, their son is a scriptwriter and gay. These scenes work remarkably well. The dialogue is often incisive, sometimes funny, occasionally both at the same time. When Adam tells his mother about his sexuality, her first question is ‘Since when?’ – a reasonable question from someone whose son was only eleven when she last talked with him. Mum is astonished to learn that a male couple can now get married and have children together: ‘Isn’t that having your cake and eating it?’
This interaction and others seem to happen in a kind of suspended present but Adam also encounters his parents in particularly memorable childhood contexts. Andrew Haigh does wonders with both types of sequence, as scenes involving the decoration of the family Christmas tree illustrate especially well. Annual ritual dictated that Dad saw to the tree single-handed except that Adam was allowed to put the fairy on the top. As he and his father recall this, they both laugh at its retrospective significance but it’s not long before Dad is tearfully contrite that he wasn’t more sensitive to his young son’s developing nature. In a later sequence, when Dad decorates the tree, the watching figure of Adam, though still his adult self, is shot so as to suggest the small boy’s point of view, gazing up at his father. A potentially very tricky episode in which Adam – still Andrew Scott but wearing kid’s nightwear – gets into his parents’ bed, between the two of them, is brought off with amazing skill. Mum recalls that Adam often slept with her and Dad: ‘You were always scared of something or other – murderers breaking in, rabies, nuclear war …’ She pauses before asking, ‘Do people still get rabies?’ Haigh is able to combine, without any apparent conflict between them, a credible, amusing verbal detail like that with the startling disruption of the scene, as Dad is suddenly replaced in the bed by Harry.
The London sex scenes aren’t so interesting. Jamie D Ramsay’s lighting stresses their importance yet the film narrows in these sequences. There’s plenty more good dialogue for Adam and Harry on the margins of their love-making though it’s surprising, given the twenty-year age gap between the actors concerned, that Haigh doesn’t have them talk much about differences between growing up gay in the late eighties/early nineties and two decades later. (This feels less surprising by the end of All of Us Strangers.) Of course it’s clear that Harry is sexually bold compared with fearfully inhibited Adam but so was Joe Orton vis-à-vis Kenneth Halliwell: you get a sharper sense of the particular experience of Adam’s generation through his mother’s reactions. When he tells her he’s homosexual, Mum is immediately uncomfortable but disappointed rather than disparaging – she’s also alarmed, because of AIDS. A sequence where Adam and Harry do hallucinogenic drugs at a dance club had, for this viewer, rather confusing consequences: when Adam appears to have a fantasy wrapped in a nightmare inside a bad trip, he becomes an unreliable narrator at a different level. The most potent bit in the Adam-Harry story comes once they’re in an apparently settled relationship and Adam wants Harry to meet his parents. After taking the usual train journey, they arrive at the house but Mum and Dad don’t answer the door even though Harry, if not Adam, can glimpse them inside.
They could see Harry, too, as we learn at Adam’s last session with his parents. This takes place in an eatery at Croydon’s Whitgift shopping centre – for Adam in the mid-1980s the next best thing to Disneyland. (This sequence features one of the only two other credited cast members – Ami Tredrea as a waitress. John Carter Grout makes a couple of brief appearances as the boy Adam – for example, when the older Adam stands outside the family home, looks up to what used to be his bedroom window and sees his younger self there.) In Whitgift, Mum and Dad suggest that Adam stop seeing them, otherwise he’ll never move on. He fills up childishly at first before accepting this. This scene of farewell – something denied to Adam and his parents in 1987 – is understated; what follows isn’t. Adam returns to the tower block in London to discover Harry dead in his own flat – and dead for some time, judging from the smell that hits Adam when he enters the place. A few screen minutes later, Harry is talking again, telling Adam that he can’t bear to be remembered as a stinking corpse with only an empty bottle for company.
Neither Harry’s corpse nor this post-mortem confrontation is a bolt from the blue. Even allowing that the high-rise is newly built, it’s hard to accept as reality that Adam and Harry are apparently the only two people living in it: we’re bound to wonder if the vast emptiness around Adam chiefly expresses his sense of isolation. We may also have noticed that details in Adam’s scenes with his parents are echoed in the immediately following scenes between him and Harry. When he leaves his parents after their first meeting, they ask him to come and see them again; after he and Harry have first been intimate, there’s a similar conversation about a repeat visit to Adam’s flat. Adam arrives at Sanderstead in heavy rain; Mum insists he change into dry clothes of Dad’s though Adam’s embarrassed to undress in front of her. He gets drenched on the way back to his London home, too; Harry runs Adam a hot bath and jokily asks if he should close his eyes as Adam prepares to get in it. When he first sees a photograph of Dad, Harry pronounces him ‘handsome’ – the same adjective that Dad eventually uses to describe Harry. As well as taking Dad’s place in the parental bed, Harry sounds a bit like Adam’s description of the kindly policeman who arrived at the house on the night of Mum and Dad’s fatal car crash. Although Haigh’s screenplay makes few explicit references to the one that Adam’s writing, we never forget about it: when Harry dies and, like Adam’s parents, persists beyond death, we realise that – as a piece of fiction is sometimes finally revealed to be all-just-a-dream – All of Us Strangers may be all-just-a-script. Except that just-a-script doesn’t quite do justice to Andrew Haigh’s writing achievement.
He also directs the actors impeccably. All of Us Strangers gives Andrew Scott his first starring role in cinema since the feeble Steel Country (2018)[1] and he makes the most of it. He inhabits the character of Adam completely and convincingly; since Adam is such a lonely, melancholy figure (and so much of what he has to do is reactive), it’s a welcome bonus that Haigh has supplied Scott with more than a few opportunities to remind us of his wit. Jamie Bell and Claire Foy are excellent: they clearly, thoroughly understand what Haigh has in mind; the suppleness and invention of Foy’s line readings are a revelation. Words between Adam and Mum at the start of the bed sequence almost summarise what makes much of All of Us Strangers successful. Adam asks his mother if what he’s experiencing is real; she responds by asking him if it feels real; when he says it does, she suggests he has answered his own question. Watching the film is rather similar: the impossible scenes between Adam and his parents are unarguably true. I’m less sure about Adam and Harry, though. You can’t say Paul Mescal isn’t effective but, despite his strong presence and sensitivity, this is the least satisfying performance I’ve seen from him. Whether that’s because he’s playing an idea rather than an authentic character, is hard to say. The exchanges between Adam’s adult self and his parents are steeped in regret – a sense of missed opportunities – on both sides. Adam’s renewing contact with Harry beyond the latter’s death may also be fuelled by feelings of what-might-have-been but they don’t mean as much. Did the pair have any actual relationship at all – at least beyond the point at which timid Adam declined to let Harry and his whisky cross the threshold?
Like the film’s cinematography (the London part anyway), Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s electronic score tends to the portentous but Haigh uses it discreetly and 1980s pop songs powerfully – Fine Young Cannibals’ ‘Johnny Come Home’, the Housemartins’ ‘Build’, Pet Shop Boys’ cover of ‘Always on My Mind’. (For me, the potency of ‘Always on My Mind’ is twofold here: it’s poignant that Mum and Dad, who didn’t get to see out 1987, sing along to the Christmas number one of that year; it’s resonant because Christmas 1987 happened to be important in my life, too, and ‘Always on My Mind’ was a memorable part of it.) The most important number on the soundtrack, though it’s another terrific one, is more problematic. Frankie Goes To Hollywood are performing ‘The Power of Love’ on the television screen that Adam’s watching at the start of the film; this is also the theme song for Haigh’s visually extravagant epilogue. Adam lies on his bed with Harry, embraces him and quotes a bit of the lyric (‘I’ll protect you from the hooded claw …’) as an intro to what Paul Flynn in the London Evening Standard has neatly termed ‘a wildly sentimental, volte face closing frame, which suggests that if we only hold each other closer we can all be stars in the night sky’. Despite this, and although Adam’s scenes with his parents are touching, there’s nothing in All of Us Strangers, intriguing and imaginative as it is, that has the emotional wallop of Tom Courtenay’s great speech, and Charlotte Rampling’s wonderful reaction to it, at the anniversary dinner in Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years (2015)[2]. The calculated chilly bleakness of Adam’s flat and the carefully tasteful sex scenes have a distancing effect. They also share with the supposedly very different, OTT finale an excessive solemnity.
8 October 2023
[1] It was renamed A Dark Place for its North American release in 2019.
[2] Afternote: Although a second viewing of All of Us Strangers a few months later (on its general release in Britain) didn’t exactly change my mind on this, I did find it more consistently affecting – the Adam-Mum-Dad parts anyway – than I had done at the LFF screening.
