ALL OF US STRANGERS

Before we begin, please remember to bring your own tissues. This film's one of the most devastating titles of the last few years. 

Andrew Haigh’s ALL OF US STRANGERS follows Adam, a screenwriter living alone in a new London apartment block. His life is quiet, ordered, and sealed off from the rest of the world. Then he meets Harry, a neighbour who appears at his door one night with a bottle of wine in hand and suddenly everything Adam thought he knew changes. 

At the same time, Adam begins returning to the suburban house where he grew up. There, impossibly, he finds his parents still living as they were before they died when he was a child. They haven’t aged. He has. What follows is less a ghost story than an emotional reckoning, as Adam tries to speak to the people he lost with the knowledge of the adult he became.

Andrew Scott gives a beautifully restrained performance, carrying years of grief, desire, fear, and unfinished conversation in the smallest changes of expression. Paul Mescal brings Harry a tender volatility, while Claire Foy and Jamie Bell make Adam’s parents feel both ordinary and unreachable.

ALL OF US STRANGERS is one of the most affecting British films of recent years. It’s about queer adulthood, family memory, the need to be recognised, and the strange ache of imagining the conversations a closed-off life never allowed you to have.