An empty flat looks very different depending on whether someone is expected back. The same clean surfaces, the same closed door. One version is peaceful. The other has started to feel permanent.
Andrew Haighβs All of Us Strangers gives that silence an entire tower block. Adam, played by Andrew Scott, lives in a nearly empty London building. Harry, played by Paul Mescal, is a neighbour who interrupts his solitude. Elsewhere, Adamβs dead parents are apparently still at home, unchanged by the thirty years he has had to live without them. That is the premise laid out by Searchlight, and it is already enough to make a perfectly ordinary evening feel suspect.
The modern building is the detail that keeps catching. A haunted house usually comes with a warning in the architecture: the bad staircase, the sealed room, the wallpaper nobody should have chosen. This one could be an upgrade. Somewhere you might move when life is finally supposed to be getting better.
There is something particularly bleak about giving loneliness an expensive-looking address. The room has been delivered. The life that was meant to happen inside it remains outstanding.
the past still answers the door
The parents are a more intimate disturbance. Adam can return to them, but returning does not make the intervening years disappear. Ben Waltersβs Sight and Sound review is useful on the uncomfortable coexistence of parental tenderness and inherited homophobia. Affection does not automatically supply understanding. A parent can love a child and still help teach that child to hide.
That is a cruel thing for a ghost story to leave intact. Bringing people back would be so much easier if they returned with the right vocabulary, a complete apology and the benefit of everything learned in their absence. Haigh allows the reunion to be more awkward than that.
The fantasy of going home tends to leave out the conversation you would have once you got there.
the happy ending has a long commute
Queer adulthood is often described as an eventual destination: get out, come out, find your people. There are good reasons those promises matter. But a destination can become another way to judge the person who has reached the right city, acquired the right freedoms, and is still eating alone.
The most troubling question here is how much of a life can be spent waiting to feel as though it has begun. A new address can make that waiting less visible. So can a relationship. Neither comes with a receipt for the years already spent.
Scott and Mescal supply the romance, but the premise refuses to let desire clear the building of everything that was there before it. There is another person within reach. There is also a whole past in the room.
This is the darker companion to the Weekend conversation from Sunday: what happens when the time available to two men is crowded by time that cannot be recovered?
The unnerving thing about the flat is how little it needs to change. Someone could come over. The light could stay on. From outside, it would be almost impossible to tell the difference.
Watch the official All of Us Strangers trailer from Searchlight Pictures on YouTube.
Film written and directed by Andrew Haigh. This essay discusses the published premise and leaves the ending alone. Image credits: featured still of Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, photo by Parisa Taghizadeh, courtesy of Searchlight Pictures, Β© 2023 Searchlight Pictures; kitchen-table still of Claire Foy and Andrew Scott, courtesy of Searchlight Pictures, Β© 2023 Searchlight Pictures; sitting-room still of Jamie Bell and Andrew Scott, courtesy of Searchlight Pictures, Β© 2024 Searchlight Pictures. Official publicity images from the Searchlight press gallery, used for editorial coverage. All rights reserved.
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