Starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy, Jamie Bell

Written and Directed by Andrew Haigh

Searchlight, in cinemas

After rebuffing the attentions of a drunken neighbour, a lonely screenwriter is looking for an imaginative route to resolving his grief for his dead parents.

The problem with reviewing All Of Us Strangers for Sci-Fi Bulletin is that the mere act of submitting this wonderful film for genre appraisal, is, in itself, something of a spoiler. The less you know about it, the better, and so I shall endeavour to spoil it as little as is critically possible, although having said that, the trailers have been so keen to hide its various twists and turns, they have sold the movie as a rather vague and unappetising mush of gay misery, which is not what it is at all. For that reason, it is, at least worth expanding a little on the set-up.

Andrew Scott – on even more impressive form than he is normally – plays Adam, a screenwriter in his forties, living alone in a semi-deserted up-market apartment block with spectacular views over London. He’s trying to write about his parents, who died when he was twelve, and takes to ‘visiting’ them in the suburban family home where he grew up. But is this the imaginative exercise of a blocked writer, or are his mum and dad (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) something more? Meanwhile, after rejecting the offer of sex from drunken Harry who lives down on the sixth floor, Adam has a change of heart and embarks on an intense affair with the younger man, who seems in many ways more self-assured, despite clearly having issues he hasn’t yet confronted.

For much of the film’s 106 minutes these strands appear to relate in a purely juxtapositional way, but when they do finally touch on each other, it takes the story to another, far richer level.

Last year, on these pages, I reviewed Joanna Hogg’s worthy but unsatisfying attempt to exploit haunted house English Gothic to explore her own parental grief in The Eternal Daughter. In many ways, All Of Us Strangers is the same film, only here, writer/director Andrew Haigh demonstrates that he understands the genre beyond mere superficial tropes. All Of Us Strangers works not just as a truthful emotional character piece, but also as that well-crafted genre narrative.

Aside from Scott at the top of his game, Claire Foy gives a masterclass in perfectly observed maternal ambivalence, and the scenes between the two are some of the most affecting I’ve seen gracing a cinema screen for a while. But this is a film full of perfectly calibrated ambiguities, which can also be found in Paul Mescal’s Harry, and Jamie Bell’s understated Dad, over whom a wonderfully subtle question mark hangs from the moment of his first appearance.

Verdict: All Of Us Strangers is that rare beast, a movie that appears to be all about mood and nuance, but satisfies because it works at the fundamental level of narrative, and best of all, enigma. 9/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com