(courtesy IMP Awards)
It’s a distinctly odd thing when grief finally and fully gets its murderous hooks into you.
All of your life up until that point, you are told what grief is, what it looks like and the kind of trajectory it will follow which is, we’re told, much like the version presented in Hollywood movies; the thing is that when it strikes you, properly ruinously strikes you like it did when both parents of this reviewer died within three years of each other, it looks and feels nothing like the almost saccharine iteration dreamt up by screenwriters eager to talk about grief but not wanting to scare the audience too much with the stark reality of the state.
That’s not to diss screenwriters, even a little bit; there are plenty of films where they have laid it all out but in certain tier of film, the ones, designed to court massive audiences and super healthy box office takings, grief is awful but quickly gives way to empowerment, new beginnings and hope.
And yes, many of do get through grief eventually, or at least it’s initial manifestation because let’s be honest, it never really goes away (Adam: “It was a long time ago.” / Harry: “Yeah, I don’t think that matters.”), but as Andrew Haigh’s luminously moving film, All of Us Strangers, beautifully and heartbreakingly evokes, it doesn’t happen anywhere near as quickly or smoothly as many films would have us believe.
Grief, in fact, lingers and isolates and imprisons and robs, and while it is manifestation of how powerfully you loved someone and not to be scorned because of that, it is one of the trickiest emotional states for anyone to navigate, exemplified by Andrew Scott as Adam, a screenwriter, ironically enough, who sits in his apartment high above the city of London trying to write a screenplay that defies him with its rigorous commitment to keeping the screen of his laptop distressingly blank.
It turns out, we find out later, that Adam is trying to write about the death of his parents in a car accident back in 1987 when he was just 12, and while he has the facts at hand and a great deal of time has technically passed since that terrible period, he remains trapped in the mire of grief that seized him then and never let him go.
Like any of us would, he wonders what life would have been like had his parents lived, and he mentions later that he created scenarios in his mind where he and his mum and dad went to Disneyland and celebrated Christmas and grew to be adults together.
It’s an enchanting idea that helps Adam not to feel so robbed and alone, but it’s all pie in the sky imagining until one day, and this is where a groundedly real film about grief and loss attains a supernaturally magical air, he goes back to his childhood home, and after wandering through the old neighbourhood, sees his father in his late ’80s suburban best.
This wholly unexpected chance encounter leads to drinks and a catch-up with his mum and dad in their old home, with everything feeling so tangible and real that Adam doesn’t for a second question it.
You’d think you would, since here are his dead parents alive in the here and now, aware they are dead, and cognisant that their son is now a grown gay man – his coming out scene with his mum is powerful in its honesty, as is his later chat with his dad who simply hugs him and says he always knew – and sitting across from a table or a kitchen breakfast bar or tucking him into bed.
How in anything approaching the grim certainties of the flesh and blood world could this even happen?
Neither Adam nor All of Us Strangers interrogates this impossible but welcome oddity for a moment, with the film, which is exquisitely and thoughtfully well written by Haigh based on the book Strangers by Taichi Yamada, keeps things mysteriously unexplained, a reflection of the fact that life rarely comes with ready explanation and that even magically real moments like this exist in the possible realms of strange but ill-explained things life dishes out to us.
While Adam is finally getting to know his parents as he is now, he is tentatively taking steps towards a relationship with neighbour Harry (Paul Mescal), a man whom he meets after a fire alarm sends the few people willing to leave their apartments out onto the street.
His initial meeting with a very drunk Harry, who propositions a clearly nervous Adam who is not only walled up in his apartment but behind fearsomely thick, grief-reinforced layers of emotional protection, doesn’t go well – it’s clearly Harry vulnerably needs something (and he’s a little intensely weird as a result) but Adam isn’t sure what that is and is too afraid to let Harry in – and Adam returns to his lonely life in an apartment block and city that seems strangely depopulated, a reflection you assume of how alone Adam feels all the time.
After hiding himself from the world ever since his parents died, and wondering what the point of the future is, Adam finally has an inkling of life awake and alive and possible, his dead, imprisoned heart slowly freed by his time with his parents and their unconditional love, and his nascent relationship with Harry who is estranged from his family but eager to forge ties with someone like Adam.
There’s so much hope and possibility woven into the narrative and thematic DNA of All of Us Strangers but it has to contend with mountains of past pain and loss and so it takes things meditatively slowly, allowing Adam the time he needs to come to grips with what happened to him all those years ago.
This empathetically unspooled walk towards something approaching the light culminates in a heartstoppingly moving final act where Adam has to make some fairly huge decisions and to allow some daunting emotional realities to shift and settle in his newly liberated world.
There’s a good deal of All of Us Strangers which is quite fantastical but for all that, Haigh asks us again and again to look into the emotional reality at play in these moments, an existential therapy of sorts that sees Adam finally coming to grips with what he has lost, what he might have had and the finality of the fact that he is where he is and that he must make his peace with it.
As a love letter to the power of down-in-the-trenches-of-life love, All of Us Strangers is unparalleled, a luxuriously intense and magically real meditation on what happens when the impossible manifests and we get all those lost moments back we thought we gone forever.
It’s absolutely, astonishingly, movingly beautiful, a film that doesn’t rush itself, that knows grief takes time to work through and that we can be easily stuck in it and that it takes something extraordinary to wrench us out of it.
That Adam is wrenched well and truly from the bog of his own lingeringly massive loss is unquestioned, but what truly sets apart All of Us Strangers, which is anchored by wondrously emotionally evocative ’80s tracks like “You Were Always on My Mind” by the Pet Shop Boys and “The Power of Love” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, is how it knows how much we yearn for the times that never were and how much we would embrace them if they were to make an appearance as they magically do for Adam, and how that might heal us so profoundly that we could handle just about anything, just as Adam is called to do in the closing scenes of what is a truly remarkable and affectingly magnificent masterpiece of a film.
Watch Andrew Haigh explain what he believes is the key scene in the film …
And here’s a behind-the-scenes special …