I See Dead People
Parisa Taghizadeh/Searchlight Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
All of Us Strangers (2023)
It’s human nature to want to be loved, but it is unfortunately also human nature to reject that which seems repulsive to you. This can make life very hard for us homosexuals, who are often rejected by our birth families simply because of who we are. The greatest achievement of Western culture in this critic’s lifetime is seeing gay people be allowed to move from the margins into a blasé part of mainstream society, so average and ordinary that it’s often beneath comment. But that’s not to say this tolerance, which is not the same thing as acceptance, is consistent. And it’s also very important to remember this can’t be applied retrospectively. Older relatives are famous for not being understanding of the younger members of their families regardless of their sexuality, and as an adult you can spend a long time down a rabbit hole wondering if the relatives you loved and lost as a child would have loved you now.
“All of Us Strangers” is a fantasia on these unanswerable questions, hitting the very raw nerve of needing your family to love you, and dancing around the common queer experience of your family preferring their heteronormative ideals instead of their actual relatives. That makes “All of Us Strangers” both important and extremely dangerous. It uses simple cinematic techniques – mostly Bill Brown’s art direction and Jamie Ramsay’s dreamlike cinematography – to convey a supernatural tone, but it also allows a frightening fantasy to threaten a real life.
Adam (Andrew Scott) is a English screenwriter living such a solitary life in London that his apartment building has only one other tenant. This is Harry (Paul Mescal), who shows up drunk at Adam’s door after a fire alarm is pulled one night. Harry tries to flirt, but his neediness is so strong Adam gently but firmly closes his door in Harry’s face. Later he regrets this, and when he next bumps into Harry he apologises, which immediately leads to a sexual relationship. Meanwhile Adam is working on a screenplay about his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy), who raised him in a London suburb before their deaths in a car crash when he was 12. He finds some old photos and decides to go take a look at the house in which he was raised, only to find he is able to walk in the door where his parents are waiting for him.
His mum and dad are aware they are dead and he’s an adult, but not what’s happened in his life since their absence. Adam’s dad utters an antigay slur during their first reunion, which means that immediately Adam has to make a choice. Can he enjoy this impossible time as if he was a little boy, or must he come out to them and risk destroying this impossible magic? It’s a dramatic dilemma: Adam is now torn between a new relationship with Harry which will ground him into the world and give his life a fresh purpose, and the chance to reconcile with his parents, or at least their ghosts.
Mr. Bell has grown up in movies and turned into an actor who so strongly glows with decency and goodwill that at the talk following the screening this critic attending the (female) compere referred to him as “Dad.” Ms. Foy, who is close to becoming typecast as a fiercely protective mother, is his match in their love for their son and their bewilderment at his present. Mr. Mescal, who continues to demonstrate an outrageous talent for making the right career choices, is so appealing that he’s an equal counterpoint to the choice that Adam must, must make. But this is Mr. Scott’s movie. He is an actor of such unbelievably detailed talent that he recently was able to sell out an entire West End run of a production of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” in which he played every single part, with minimal alterations to the script (including two sex scenes), entirely alone. His gift for expressing minor changes in mood to project a complicated yet palpable tone is on glorious display here, as Adam’s sadness becomes mixed with joy at this insane piece of luck, as well as grief that this insane piece of luck cannot last forever.
But in the midst of an audience sobbing themselves into breathlessness, you have to wonder. Who is this insane movie for? For the makers it feels obvious: Writer-director Andrew Haigh, who filmed the reunion scenes in his childhood home, clearly exorcised some personal demons; Mr. Mescal took his part to counterbalance some unpleasant rumors of his pre-fame behavior; and Mr. Scott is making a serious bid to be considered a bankable leading man in movies instead of just television. But what about the audience? Why on earth should we see this? Is it to enable us to pretend, just for a minute, that our adult selves are as lovable as our innocent childhood ones? That our own lost loved ones, if we were able to be reunited, would be able to love and accept us exactly as we are now? Or is it that we need to tell ourselves lies about our own lovability in order to survive?
This is an adaptation of a Japanese novel by Taichi Yamada, and the source material is almost certainly darker and weirder than what is shown here, though the final onscreen plot twist is plenty grim. It’s grimmer still that Mr. Haigh handles it with such throwaway lightness that it becomes more disturbing the more you think about it. A braver and better movie would have made the parents less angelic; and it would have given Adam a bustling life instead of a lonely one. If you’re happy it’s harder to be haunted. The fact that Adam is so desperate for the lie that a life with ghosts is as valuable as life among the living – the noisy, smelly, fussy, demanding living – that the attempts at catharsis sink like an exploding battleship. It’s awful to think anyone would prefer the memories of their cherished dead to their present life. And it’s awful to think that this is being sold to gay audiences as a romance, as a chance to fully experience queer love onscreen. Do they think we won’t understand the horror of the final shot?
What makes this stranger still is that Adam’s parents died in the 1980s, when gay narratives strongly encouraged us to forget the families which rejected and/or abused us in preference to found families, of loving and supportive communities primarily of fellow homosexuals. If you look at gay movies from or set in the 1980s – such as Mr. Scott’s own “Pride,” for example – this is the primary plot. Nowadays art of all kinds focuses on the importance of family above all else, and the idea that you can never escape your genetic heritage is pervasive, which some (including this critic) would say is profoundly fascist. One can’t go quite that far with “All of Us Strangers,” but it sure is depressing that we can no longer tell the difference between a love story and a shrieking nightmare.
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