BUT A DREAM
ANDREW HAIGH’S ALL OF US STRANGERS (2023)
Two rising stars are luminous in Andrew Haigh’s meditation on limbo, brevity and the vitality of connection.
Every 5-6 years, I dream of my grandfather. I round a corner in an unknown, low ceilinged, ranch style home, and there he is. He typically just stands, and looks. I offer a greeting, like, “it’s nice to see you – it’s been a while...” But he never responds. The dream dissolves too quickly.
From the beginning frames of director Andrew Haigh’s fourth feature, All of Us Strangers, moments form and then dissolve before our eyes. A sunrise slowly reveals our main character, Adam (Andrew Scott in the best role of his growing career), as he watches from behind his apartment window. Placid streaks of clouds, emergent orange light, a thinly distant skyline, and glass layer atop one another as his upper figure materializes in the space before us.
In its first minute, the beauty of the film is revealed. This is a story about the liminal, the ephemeral and the depth of living we all truly do there. Life is not just a series of moments, but also a series of transitions in between those moments, where many hours are spent – looking out windows, taking trains, falling asleep, dreaming, thinking, wondering – for some, these account for far more of their limited time on this rock than doing, achieving and knowing.
Adam is a screenwriter living in a new high rise condo, the kind that have sprung up in every global city around the world, set outside the city center but with amenities and comfort that has become standard for the thirty and forty something professional. He is an early resident; the building is mostly empty, save one other named Harry, played by a down-to-the-bone vulnerable Paul Mescal, who comes to visit him and recognize their joint isolation. Adam is muted, pensive and courteous, allowing Harry to take the emotional lead. When he shares that his parents died in a car accident when he was 12, he says “it was a long time ago.” Harry responds, “I don’t think that matters.”
The director, Andrew Haigh, has taken viewers on slow walks through relationships before, most recently in 45 Years (2015), and in Weekend (2011), the latter a favorite among gay male audiences for its humility and realism. He has described Strangers as a “very personal film,” which is evidenced by the fact that Adam’s childhood home in the film is Haigh’s actual childhood home. When Adam visits, he encounters the apparitions of his parents, frozen at the ages they were when they passed, but able to speak and interact with Adam. These scenes have the feeling of looking through a box of keepsakes and family heirlooms of a loved one, slightly musty, but warm and brimming with memory.
What would you say to someone you loved who is gone? And what would you hope to hear in return? These questions live at the heart of Strangers, and in the curiosities of most of us in life who have lost people – particularly queer people whose identities were never reconciled within their families.
In Weekend, the two main characters Glen and Russell have a chance hookup that leads to a weekend spent together. We now recognize Haigh’s stage setting of Strangers back in this film from 2011:
Glen: Do you ever think about finding your parents?
Russell: No, not really.
Glen: Why not?
Russell: I don't really see the point. You know, I don't think it would change anything.
Glen: Why don't I pretend to be your dad and you can come out to me?
Here, over a decade later, our gay male protagonist gets just this kind of chance. Adam takes the train from metro London out to the suburbs, where he enters his childhood home to sit and talk with his parents. Sometimes his mother is there, played simply and relatably by Claire Foy, without any of the makeup and gloss of Netflix’s The Crown. Sometimes it’s his father, a mustache-adorned Jamie Bell, with a similar sparse pragmatism. Their conversations are practical; direct; loving; familiar; painful; revealing, and brief. There is never quite enough time.
But the blood of the film pulses the loudest between Adam and Harry, back in their quiet high rise, in quiet conversations in bath rooms, living rooms, bedrooms. Scott effortlessly inhabits Adam with a contemporary quietude, not so much conjuring tears as experiencing them. And Mescal, whose talents were widely praised in 2022’s Aftersun, does much more here, leaning into Harry’s vulnerability, damage, longing and caregiving as if he had always lived in the high rise and was simply waiting for Adam’s arrival. The pair has true chemistry, both inhabiting the space between one another and bringing to life an emblem of many queer people and relationships.
One perception of the queer community is its high level of expression – that most queer people are living “out and proud,” expressing themselves boldly and raising their voices noticeably. But there are just as many who prefer the quiet of home, who do not feel the free abandon of not caring what anyone thinks (including their family), and who do not fill conversations with bubbling chatter. They are the reclusive Charlie in The Whale (2022). Q in the latest Bond series. Johnny and Gheorghe in God’s Own Country (2017). Oliver and Elio in Call Me By Your Name (2017). Just like any other subset of humanity, some are compelled to have their voices heard, and others are content to receive a hidden act of love from another, like a hot bath after a cold day.
The scenes with Adam’s parents are vital, teeming with feeling, driving towards the center of this filmmaker’s ideas and questions about love, family and identity. But it is the time we get to spend with Adam and Harry, two vulnerable yet loving men, played by two exceptional actors whom we may hope to enjoy on screen for decades to come, that linger, days and weeks afterwards. And the temporality is all too real – we come to wish these two men had more time as well. But this film is about the ephemeral; the moments, both in actual life and in dreams, that reveal to us who we are and then dissolve into memory.
Haigh brings a very capable and disciplined team with him to this film, including director of photography Jamie Ramsey and composer Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, both of whom worked on Living (2009) with Bill Nighy and District 9 (2009). Levienaise-Farrouch’s score, especially, becomes a cool hand on the experience of viewing the film; under different guidance, we would have swells of strings and embellishments of the already emotional scenes. But instead, we have ambience reminiscent more of modern sci-fi than melodrama. And the visual effects are also elegant and purposeful, applied with a modest, peaceful touch and style (think the opposite of Marvel films), with choices that enrich its characters and deepen its story. Every department is performing in concert, guided by Haigh’s steady hand, achieving a cohesion, consistency and excellence in both filmmaking and mood making.
All of these choices bring us to and keep us in a dreamy limbo. We always know the location (high rise or family home), but we never really know the day or the hour. We know Adam is working on a screenplay, but he doesn’t seem to be on deadline. We never learn Harry’s profession. Adam’s parents inhabit the space between this world and the next. There are few indications how long each character has in her or his state, nor how long scenes will last for us as viewers.
Art created about liminal spaces and states is plentiful, and Strangers recalls that still, curious, transitory feeling of some examples that came before it:
The hush and stillness of paintings like Johannes Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep (1656-57)
The cool remoteness of etchings like Edward Hopper’s The Lonely House (1922)
The usettling feeling of purgatory in Edward Camus’ The Stranger (1942)
The ethereal, other-worldly ambience of music by artists like Brian Eno and Max Richter
The dream-like waking state of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997)
The casual down time of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003)
The quiet lives of the characters of Alice Munro, in collections like Dear Life (2012)
Everyone knows what it is like to live in a liminal state. But there are some who feel that in a broader sense, they do not inhabit a state that is identifiable, concrete or describable. This can feel like existing in between knowledge and uncertainty, between connection and isolation, between desire and fulfillment. Logical thinking does not produce satisfying answers for these states, and instead they turn away from it, an act of submission to the mystery and unknowability of life.
We need ambitious biopics, and thrilling action sagas, and smart comedies, and everything in between. But we also need small, quiet, still and deep pictures like Strangers, to help us remember how important it is to live and breathe in these liminal spaces; how deep they are, and we are, as we attempt to appreciate, if not understand, our existence, ourselves, and what we are to one another during the brief but vital moments we share.