“Solving” the film’s psychological mysteries – understanding how Adam’s ghosts arise from his grief – is the film’s central interpretive demand, and one of its pleasures. It’s the film’s conclusion – its jumble of confusing, of confused, elements – that requires the kind of willed passivity that Wilkinson recommends. Without it difficult questions arise.
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Here is what happens in the last ten minutes or so of All of Us Strangers. This will all be spoilers.
Adam (Andrew Scott) returns from his final reunion with his parents, who died in a car crash when he was eleven but have recently appeared to him as they were before they died, “ghosts” utterly real to his senses. He drops in on his boyfriend, Harry (Paul Mescal), who lives in the same apartment building, and, shocked by the odor emanating from Harry’s bedroom, confirms that Harry is dead, most likely owing to a drug overdose. But before Adam can leave Harry’s apartment, Harry’s “ghost” suddenly appears. Adam consoles Harry and declares his love. (“I was too scared to let you in.”)
There’s more. Upstairs in Adam’s apartment, Adam and Harry are in bed, preparing for sleep. As Adam holds and comforts Harry, we hear a pop song, “The Power of Love” (“Love is the light keeping darkness away.”). The frame recedes, until Adam and Harry shrink to a circle of light at the center of the dark screen. Stars slowly appear around them. Apotheosized – their own star flashing brightly – they join the mythological beings whose constellations shine, nightly, on us all.
Alissa Wilkinson, reviewing the film in the New York Times, advises viewers to “just feel your way through, letting it roll over you.” But everything that happens before the final minutes is, with a little effort, easy enough to understand. In fact, “solving” the film’s psychological mysteries – understanding how Adam’s ghosts arise from his grief – is the film’s central interpretive demand, and one of its pleasures. It’s the film’s conclusion – its jumble of confusing, of confused, elements – that requires the kind of willed passivity that Wilkinson recommends. Without it difficult questions arise. How did Harry die? Had he shown any inclination toward serious drug abuse? More important, whom did love save? Not Harry, who’s dead. Nor has love saved Adam from Harry’s death, or his parents’ deaths.
And how, finally, are we to take Adam’s power to summon ghosts – to revive the dead? In the film’s climax, Adam takes Harry to his childhood home, site of his encounters with his parents’ ghosts, with the intention of bringing them all together. But Harry, realizing that Adam believes his parents are alive – that grief has driven him to delusion – is shaken and horrified, and flees the scene. And it’s after witnessing Harry’s reaction that Adam agrees, finally, to stop seeing his parents, apparitions whose existence, he seems to realize, depends on him. His reversion to fantasy in “reviving” Harry, at the end, is a shocking reversal, a triumph of uncontrollable desperation. How could Andrew Haigh (screenwriter as well as director) manage to see any of this positively? It would take a Hail Mary.
The protagonist is, of course, Adam – whose story builds so strong a momentum that it may take an act of reflection to realize that its world is populated by just four people – four roles, four actors. Andrew Scott would seem to be well suited to play Adam. He specializes in stricken souls, deeply sensitive but closed off, incommunicative. Conversation with a Scott character won’t have an easy flow. He typically delays his responses, holding attention with his ink-dark eyes – then responds unexpectedly, with speech oddly accelerated, say, or oddly stressed, accompanied, perhaps, by an antic facial or bodily gesture. Scott has been able to adapt this persona to a variety of roles – to Tom Ripley at one extreme, to Hamlet at another (and apparently, in a recent London production, to every role in Uncle Vanya). He certainly has his moments here. We believe that he’s afflicted – lonely and grieving, desolate even. But often, in dramatic interaction, where some might see creativity and daring, others will see contrivance and calculation.
Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal in ALL OF US STRANGERS. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.
Whoever plays Harry has to be, believably, both charming and a good partner to Adam. Paul Mescal is a good actor and good sport. He defers to Andrew Scott’s acting rhythms and yet preserves a style of his own; they act well together – interact well together – each to the other’s benefit. But when Harry tells Adam that he’s struggled, particularly with family, as a gay man, it’s hard to see damage. Mescal’s Harry radiates personal and physical well-being. He looks like he plays rugby in the Colosseum. (In his next film Mescal stars as a Roman gladiator.) He’s comfortable in his skin the way athletes often are (in fine contrast to Scott’s repressed Adam, who can’t let go), and in fact Mescal left Irish football to pursue acting. His sex scenes with Scott are game (and sensitively filmed), though, I think, lacking in urgency. But perhaps it’s enough that Mescal, as Harry, reacts to Adam’s quirky caution and reserve with, at first, curiosity, then delight, and finally tenderness.
The most winning performance in All of Us Strangers – there seems to be consensus about this – is Claire Foy’s. As Adam’s mother, Foy introduces warmth and vitality into his sad, shadowy world. Alone with Adam in the family kitchen’s morning light, she – spontaneously and apparently all at once – draws out her guest (elicits that he’s gay), voices her own views about homosexuality, muses, makes tea, reminisces and consoles, questions and disagrees. It’s as if we’d stepped from a graveyard into a carnival. His mother’s warmth and vitality – lost to him with her death – are precisely what Adam attempts to recover in bringing her back to life; but it’s here that we, as viewers, feel the magnitude of his loss. Her vitality is subdued a bit when Adam tries to educate his mother in more up-to-date views of homosexuality. (Catechism is never fun.) But Foy holds on to the mother’s integrity – her own, unshakable love for her son, whatever the barriers that may distance them – from first to last.
Andrew Scott, Jamie Bell and Claire Foy in ALL OF US STRANGERS. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.
Jamie Bell, another seasoned actor, is fine as Adam’s father, but the role feels too restricted and functional: he’s there, in death, to accept his gay son as he never had the chance to do in life. But he’s so kind and loving toward Adam from the start that there seems to be no resistance to overcome in winning his approval (and so free of personal idiosyncrasy otherwise that nothing else about him excites our attention). In his tête-à-tête with Adam, after Adam guides him to acknowledgment of an inward stain of homophobia (Adam is a tough confessor), he weeps and asks Adam to forgive his insensitivity. A father like this, and an act like that, are a gay son’s dream. (So I teared up.) And at their farewell – the family’s last reunion – it’s the father’s declaration of pride in his son, and then love for his son, that finishes the scene. (Anyone who’s been a child will probably tear up here.)
But not quite “finishes.” Claire Foy then does something that almost makes the scene hers. She – Adam’s mother – suddenly loses her vision (“I can’t see!”), which we know happened just before she died. She is reliving her death in other words. And yet, staring blankly as she speaks, clearly stricken, she preserves her dignity, frightening no one. (Adam, we know, was kept from her deathbed, for fear that witnessing her condition would have been too painful for him.) And finally, as the scene ends, instead of a direct good-bye she voices, dreamily, what seems to be a fond memory, already fading, of “such a kind and gentle boy.” This all happens in seconds, but the film has no richer moments. Hail to all concerned.
