GLR May-June 2024

ESSAY

Spoiler Alert (Not Really) A NDREW H OLLERAN

A SCREENWRITER SITS in a dark apart ment in a high-rise in London, trying to write about his childhood. Desperate for inspira tion, he decides one day to take the Tube (subway) back to the house in which he grew up. When he arrives at his boyhood home, he discovers that his parents, who died in a car crash when he was twelve, are living there. They are unchanged. He goes inside and they serve him dinner, and he fills them in on what has hap pened since they died. Such a simple idea, and one that gets more profound as it goes along. The loneliness that drenches, soaks, All of Us Strangers is established at the start. The high-rise in which Adam, the hand some, blocked, middle-aged writer (played by Andrew Scott) lives seems to have no other residents but him. When a fire alarm goes off, he alone leaves the building and walks out into

one another over meals, or while decorating the Christmas tree, or even when sharing their bed after Adam puts on his child hood pajamas and climbs into bed between them. Adam’s fa ther (Jamie Bell) is a handsome clone—if nothing else, this film should bring back the moustache—his mother (Claire Foy) a pretty woman who seems satisfied with the way her son has turned out, until Adam reveals that he is gay, which triggers a barrage of questions. Things have gotten better, he assures her, for gay people; two men can even marry each other. (“ Why ?”his mother shouts.) The confrontation between Then and Now al lows Adam to unload a lot of baggage. Soon enough, when he returns to the high-rise, he begins to have sex, and post-coital conversations, with Harry. They even go to a disco together. Is it dreams, nightmares, or ghosts that this movie is com posed of? Haigh intentionally does not make that clear. The film flows past us in a strange state between sleeping and waking.

Has Adam, the writer, simply imagined these scenes, as writers sometimes do? Or are his parents ghosts? Some scenes make you think it’s the former, especially when his mother and father fade away like proper poltergeists in the final meeting with their son; but other scenes end when Adam wakes up suddenly in bed, like a man upset by a nightmare. In one of the numerous interviews Haigh and his four actors have given (available on YouTube), Haigh says that he didn’t want to appeal to viewers’ sense of logic; he wanted to engage their feel ings. He even chose to film the childhood scenes in the very house in which he grew up to

Paul Mescal (as Harry), Andrew Scott (Adam), and Mescal again in All of Us Strangers .

a meadow. When, back in his room, he hears a knock on his door, he finds there a young man named Harry (Paul Mescal) who tries to invite himself in, telling Adam that he is always alone, that he’s never seen Adam with anyone. Adam declines the invitation to trick, and closes the door. Everything in this film conspires to convey a profound sense of isolation: the city beneath his window that looks so far away, a small cluster of skyscrapers breaching a green canopy of trees, the strangers on the train he takes to visit his childhood home in the hope that something there will inspire him. The premise— that Adam’s parents are still the age they were on the day of their fatal car crash—means that they and their son can talk to

find out what would happen in his own encounter with the past. There are other autobiographical elements. The soundtrack includes songs that brought him solace when he was growing up in England during more homophobic times; Haigh’s parents di vorced when he was about the age that Adam was when his par ents died in a car crash—another version, you might say, of a fatal accident in a child’s eyes. The movie is based on a Japan ese novel called Strangers , by Taichi Yamada, who worked with Haigh on the screenplay but died, at the age of 89, shortly be fore the film was released. In the novel, the other person in the building is a woman, not a man. It was presumably Haigh’s idea to turn the heterosexual pair into two gay men, and the payoff is enormous. Everything in All of Us Strangers —the music, the cine

Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand.

TheG & LR

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