Analysis

Recently, I had the distinct pleasure of watching All Of Us Strangers at the cinema, a film I had heard about vaguely (in the context of it being a bit sad) and starring the wonderful Andrew Scott, familiar to me only as the priest from Fleabag (if he has a name, I honestly can’t recall it). As it turns out, this film is a truly impressive piece of work, vibrant and cohesive and thematically laser-focused even given—or perhaps despite—the laconic ease with which it seems to float, almost listlessly, through the story. Delightfully queer and exquisitely elusive, it is a profound exploration of emotional loss, deflection, and abandonment. The more I think about it, the more I realise the film is also a masterclass in understatement—which is to say that I’m sure a lot of people will find it boring. Yet, not all films need be excruciating exercises in sensory overload.

This one is certainly not shy about its themes, and utilises both traditional narrative devices as well as a fair degree of well-measured, artistic abstraction to achieve its ambitious aims. That it succeeds at those goals is a terrific achievement, particularly given the slippery slope it might have found itself upon, had it taken a more cautious or traditional approach to its subject material.

Directed by Andrew Haigh from a novel by Taichi Yamada, the film is not exactly easy to watch, though not in the sense that most confronting films tend to be. All of Us Strangers is a sly and subtle work in equal measure, and it is very easy to be lulled into a false sense that what is laid before us is benign, perhaps even a little tedious at times, before warping into something less comfortable. Train trips, used multiple times in the film as an effigy of reflectiveness (in both a literal and contemplative sense), become in one later scene something of a visual and psychological horror. An otherwise mundane mirroring becomes at first a refractive memory before shifting into a kind of psychic aspersion; a rumination upon the lost pains of childhood ripped back into sharp focus by the force—one presumes—of the hallucinogenic drugs the protagonist has taken.

Given the shrinking attention spans of audiences of all kinds, it feels like a rare and perhaps fragile thing to discover a film which insists, repeatedly, upon lingering long shots that utilise framing, refraction, and lens focus—or even simple changes in colour grading—to shift the perception of an otherwise mundane and apparently motionless shot into something much more interesting. It’s a welcome reminder of what cinema can be; that films aren’t just for consumption, but can exist to provoke contemplation and cogitation, and draw out very personal and touching—even painful—experiences, whose value can be vastly superior to that of mere visual or aural arousal.

Love Me Tender (BUT Not Sweet); NEVER LET ME GO

All of Us Strangers feels particularly intimate and immediate, in a very personal way, and it would surprise me if Haigh had not invested quite a bit of his own experience into the film and its various characters. I don’t actually know the novel upon which it is based, so take that statement as the pure conjecture it most certainly is. But arguably the greatest testament to the artistry of the film lies in just how affecting it is in parts. The way in which it illustrates the lived experience—both physically and psychologically—of its main character is frankly a wondrous accomplishment. The audience is brought distinctly and intimately into the presence of the protagonist in a way which makes the gradual explorations of his past and its associated traumas both immediately real and extraordinarily touching.

The opening shot of the film is a case in point of the film’s proficiency in regard to subtlety: it is beautiful, precise, sedate. A reflected, sunset landscape gradually fades out of focus, shifting depth to slowly reveal the blurry face of a man—the protagonist, Adam, as we soon discover—staring with a kind of lifeless torpidity into that long distance behind what we come to realise is a landscape only mirrored on the surface of glass. One might even wonder: are these images actually of the landscape reflected by the glass, or the morose figure behind it? Is it both? Or neither? That the film opens to a twilight is not insignificant insofar as the film’s themes are concerned.

Yet the scene might also just as easily be dawn as opposed to dusk—it’s precisely this kind of vague perceptive tilt which likely separates an audience’s interpretations of the film’s meaning. In a cinema of a few dozen people you might well find a few dozen slightly varying opinions and (more importantly) perspectives about what the film’s symbolic inflections might represent. In fact, the difference between a figurative dawn and a figurative sunset are, in hindsight, quite critical juxtapositions. Depending on one’s particular life experience, such contrast might render or even remake the subtext of the film in quite a radical way. Which is an amazing device; a meta-reflection if there ever was one. The entire film remains stubbornly ambiguous throughout, challenging the audience to create their own interpretations rather than delivering all the interpretive material in a neat three-act structure complete with the usual tropes.

Most viewers will likely be immediately struck by the sense that this film is pretty much the antithesis to the modern action blockbuster. Whatever various spectrums the latest tepid Marvel film might find itself upon, this likely exists on the other end of the extreme. It doesn’t busy itself with dazzling set-pieces, cool costumery, or an overwhelming choreography of artificial movement. Nor does it bother with such idiotic inanities as the clear-cut line between arbitrary constructs like “good” or “evil” (and the inevitable battle between them; those easy, oafish, and overplayed symbols which repeatedly stand in for any kind of actual moral dilemma, slapped into a narrative so an audience can intellectually fall asleep as the bright light-show begins). This film isn’t “safe”, and it’s inconceivable to think it might have gone through various iterations (and consequently ground into a tasteless powder) through the process of test screenings and audience previews. Its tone is direct and unapologetic, even as it embraces ambiguity.

Rather than clear lines and structures, All of Us Strangers works hard to dissolve delineation—whether narrative or figurative or literal, as in the case of actual blurred or distorted imagery—and by doing so conveys a sense of powerful uncertainty or anxiety, of dissonance, of trauma, of loss, of hope, of bitterness, of regret, and perhaps most of all: love, embodied by all of these things combined. As bizarre as it sounds, the love in this film is made all the more real and beautiful by its very obvious imperfection. We don’t get some last-minute, dramatic dash to express a long-held obsessive sentiment to some attractive secondary character the protagonist probably doesn’t even know that well. Nor does it culminate in one of our culture’s most popular—but heavily codified, circumscribed and, in many respects, misogynistic—ceremonies, either.

And despite its persistent presence in the film, the central theme isn’t even love: it’s death. While it juggles various other motifs, there’s no doubt that death and all its terrors, such as the fears which derive from its presence (whether immediate or commemorative), are the central pillar around which the film’s ancillary concerns are arranged. The film manipulates in various ways the manner in which we perceive or imagine death, whether in real and absolute terms, as memory, or as a reflection of who we are and what we have, or might yet, become. How, for example, are we to truly grapple with the absolute and irrecoverable loss of the people we love? How is that supposed to work? Can it even work at all? Is it beyond our ability to conceive, even as sapient beings? Are such things reconcilable? The film addresses such questions by gouging Adam’s heart from multiple directions, exposing his vulnerabilities in some pretty unsettling ways. Especially since many of Adam’s fears are the same fears we as an audience are likely to share.

Yet this isn’t a gruesome film at all. A vanilla edgelord might set about engaging in some shocking violence in order to traumatise their audience through the visceral physical suffering of the protagonist. It doesn’t need blood, nor some simple paint-by-numbers cause for retribution. Nobody’s daughter is stolen, nobody’s wife is ravished, it doesn’t involve a single droplet of the sweet-smelling sweat we call vengeance. That cinematic drug which, in the old days, might have been called wrath. Instead, Haigh paints a vivid panorama of suffering and loss in the manner which, in reality, it is typically endured. It’s dull and slow, and hurts all the more for it. There’s rarely anything spectacular about death.

To LIVE, or not to LIVE. That is the question

The context of my particular viewing All of Us Strangers was with fellow cinephile work colleagues, and after the film had finished we naturally stood around discussing it for some time. A multiplicity of theories abounded regarding the film and its quality (something which for some, including myself, was not immediately apparent in some respects, and this is absolutely the kind of film that does the rounds in your brain for a while before settling). Perhaps more pointedly, the nature of the two main characters, Adam and Harry—inescapable, once you know the plot—was a point of fascination. Death, as I mentioned, is a central theme.

Much of the film’s power lies in how it addresses some very sensitive issues around the nature of interpersonal relationships, particularly familial ones. Those watching the film who have a problematic—particularly neglectful—or otherwise difficult relationship with one or both parents will likely find the film painful. Or, conversely, potentially rewarding or even cathartic. The inherent ambiguity within the framework of the narrative allows particular characters to be viewed and judged and forgiven (or not) in a variety of ways. My parents weren’t the source of childhood trauma or neglect for me personally, so other aspects of the film stood out with far greater clarity than either the central theme or its association with resentment and regret in particular. For some of my colleagues, the film wasn’t as sad as they were preparing for it to be; but for others, it was clearly unsettling.

Personally, I enjoyed the film’s merely brief flirtation with the mystery of Adam’s excursions to his childhood home, and the nature of his parents-as-peers (at least in regard to their age). It was a delight watching both Claire Foy and Jamie Bell play affectionate and attentive parents to Andrew Scott—who, like Adam, is incongruously older than both—and play out the wonderful conceit of having to explain adult behaviour to their grown child, who in turn expresses moments of childlike naivete as well as incisive adult insight. The interplay between all three feels very natural—whether discrete parent-child discussions or the inferred dynamic between the parents as a couple—as do a spectrum of overt and covert expressions of bigotry, affection, deliberation, gratitude, and ever-present regret.

That central conceit—of a grown adult confronting the emotional realities of the death of their parents while they were only a child—plays out as the first layer of several, each imposing a more nuanced sense of uncertainty and further destabilising what limited foundations of “reality” the film deigns to offer. That Adam’s parents are dead is revealed quite early on; it doesn’t take much longer for them to appear as active characters, and mercifully this wasn’t enmeshed in some overwrought Gordian knot of a twist. It is a credit to the film that it simply presents this relatively minor riddle as something vaguely mysterious, before deftly expressing that particular revelation in the midst of a scene which is compelling enough to quickly subsume the disclosure within the characters’ interactions.

What does take one’s breath away, eventually, and which true to the film’s nature is revealed slowly and surely and without particular fanfare, is the fact of Harry’s death. Also consistent with the rest of the film is Harry’s own reaction to it—he, just as Adam’s parents do, openly acknowledges un-life in ways which feel more akin to an embarrassing past mistake than the horrific, mortal injuries they ultimately were. That is to say they each speak of death in an off-hand fashion which trivialises the severity of the impact these events have had on Adam. Engaging in that very human temptation to minimise trauma, lest they become enmeshed in the gritty act of actually having to properly process it.

For various reasons—not least the visual cues strongly alluded to throughout the film—this not-quite-twist (it’s more like a conscious obfuscation) did occur to me as a possibility earlier in the film, within the flow of revelation which accompanied the creeping sense of his parents’ revelation. Naturally, what also occurred to me at that point was to wonder whether Adam himself was even alive. I have only seen the film once but I look forward with considerable anticipation to my second viewing, with this fully in mind from the beginning. I expect that, even if it doesn’t hold up as well as I hope it might, the idea will still be allowed a certain potential, given the ambiguous promise of the film’s entire form and substance.

One might rightly wonder precisely what, then, justifies the notion that Adam might not be alive. Perhaps the fact of his lack of interaction with any character who isn’t also dead. On all his journeys, he speaks to nobody else, not one—except when he visits a cafe with his parents and that person is the figure of a waitress whose face we don’t actually see.

In the earliest part of the film there is a fire: unseen by the audience, only mentioned briefly, and otherwise inconsequential. Except… as a trigger for the inciting event facilitating the meeting of Adam and Harry for the first time, as awkward and somewhat perfunctory though it may be. Which is in fact to say that it is, narratively speaking, quite consequential indeed.

Perhaps Adam actually perished in the fire? After all, he is frequently bathed in a warm orange light, and he inexplicably coughs a lot (given that there’s no other mention of illness in the film that I can recall; for them to have inserted such a detail suggests some kind of meaning). Of course, it may just as likely be a false alarm: a phantom danger and one among many possible reasons why both characters linger in this particular place, functioning merely as a reason for them to interact. Harry says something to Adam in their first meeting along the lines of “there’s no security here—it doesn’t bode well if there was a real fire”. The word real struck me in that statement, for obvious reasons, even as the specificity of the rest of that sentence escapes me (that quote is not verbatim).

Regardless of the potential lethality of the fire, the event of the alarm itself signifies the transition from meaninglessness as the overwhelming circumstance of Adam’s life, to his acceptance of renewal and change in the form of addressing the loss of his parents and his acceptance of vulnerability and love. Ultimately, this event also facilitates a distinct transition—the film makes no definitive statement about the specificities of the transition, other than indicating change itself—from life to death, from death to something else, or perhaps simply from a kind of uncertain love into certainty; the kind Adam has obviously been missing his entire life.

Another explanation might be that Adam died with his parents in the car crash. His metaphorical journey might simply be his grappling with some childhood sense of his nascent homosexuality, and a confrontation with the possibilities of an adult life he never actually lived. These elements manifest most dramatically in scenes with his parents. Which would explain his manifestation in an adult body wearing children’s pyjamas, or behaving as his emotionally injured boyhood self might do (as opposed to something more akin to treating his parents as peers as one might expect as an adult).

Naturally, even if he was alive he may still imagine himself in this fashion whether he is dead or not—that is an integral function of the film’s many careful ambiguities. But these examples are not the only evidence of Adam’s journey being one outside the normal bounds of “life”, if not quite “existence”.

It’s not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves

The building Adam lives in exhibits a distinct quality of emptiness, both visually and physically, perhaps abandoned or—as the film infers—not yet fully tenanted. That won’t be by accident. It’s mentioned flippantly at a few places in the film, imbibing a distinct sense of loneliness. It also exudes suggestions of exile, apart-ness—rejection, abandonment, perhaps—or a sense of expulsion from the warmth which Adam yearns for.

Both Adam and Harry have been separated somehow from those they love, and both of them covet in their own way some kind of reunion with those they have “lost”—though Adam’s desire for such is expressed much more directly and explicitly. By discovering one another, they seem to transmute that yearning into a more material form of connection, in order to belay the lingering dread of separation which has traumatised them both. Expressing itself at first as something perhaps convenient and fleeting, their physically sensual and, ultimately, romantic relationship slowly constructs itself around the two as they share their experiences and discover multiple angles of familiarity, disappointment, and regret, which they both have in common even though in a more linear sense their histories are different.

Underlying this gradual process is a potential truth—at least, insofar as my viewing of the film is concerned—which turns this juxtaposition back against itself. That is, their actual situation, the literality of their condition, is far more similar than either they or the audience initially realises. The endless drudgery of Adam’s life, the loneliness of the apartment block, its cold reflection of the world “outside” or “beyond” its glass boundaries, its prison-like atmosphere… all are suggestive of a kind of purgatorial existence.

While the final few scenes of the film make explicitly clear that Harry is already physically dead, being the closest thing to a twist that the film has to offer, Adam’s nature is a more ambiguous affair. The entrapment in his apartment-as-purgatory and the ease with which he interacts with his deceased parents in such a literal way, both suggest an existence not in the physical world but in transition between worlds, specifically between life and death, where Harry also lingers.

In Dante’s Purgatorio (Purgatory), sins arise from maladaptive love: deficient love; excessive love; misdirected love, et cetera. It can surely not escape the notice of any queer person that the last millennia of ever-increasing Christian cultural dominance in western culture has frequently and very noisily condemned various expressions of homosexual identity as sinful. Central to Adam’s key interactions with his parents (as individuals, that is, not when the three of them are all present) is a reconciliation with his internalisation of their rejection of his true self via expressions of overt, or covert, homophobia. Couple that particular notion with the film’s parallel exploration of love (particularly whom one chooses to love) and death (after all, nobody gets to Purgatory—or the Inferno or Paradise for that matter—without dying first) and that sense of imprisonment-as-contrition becomes a powerful link to the metaphorical and lyrical motifs of the film. In my view, the film presents this penitence as an ironic manifestation of internalised guilt, as opposed to the externalised guilt of actual so-called “sin”.

In other words, Adam suffers through the process of imprisonment in his figurative psychological Purgatory as a result of the indirect language used by his otherwise kind-hearted parents. It this inferred rejection of his identity which engineers and fuels his suffering, as opposed to the traditional Christian iteration involving penitence as a direct result of simply embodying that inherent identity in the first place. The suggestion is that they would prefer he were not gay, which is the foundation of his internalised shame (and, ergo, his supposedly-required penitence; in my view the film allows Adam to escape his prison by embracing his identity and creating for himself a sense of abundant security in the form of Harry and their ultimate acceptance of one another).

Much visual lingering is made of the sixth floor of the apartment, the level on which Harry lives, enough to give me pause during the film. I was eager, upon finishing the film, to remind myself which corresponding terrace of Purgatory the number six pertained to. Gluttony, as it turns out, a sin which is defined as excessive consumption of food or bodily comforts or, in Harry’s case, alcohol. In Purgatorio, the souls residing on that level are not overweight but instead gaunt and starved, which is part of the poetic punishment they serve for their excessive (ie. misplaced love of) consumption. Harry’s drinking is strongly alluded to as the direct cause of his death. He is introduced in the very first scene holding a bottle, clearly having imbibed quite a bit of it already. Arguably, this is one of the facets which initially repulses Adam, and it is once he interacts with Harry sober that he comes to appreciate him.

For his part, Adam lives above Harry, on a level unmentioned (as far as I can recall; I thought it was 27, but it turns out that’s his apartment number, according to the image above). In Purgatorio, the seventh and highest level is that of Lust. Unlike the bible itself (at least in the OG Hebrew and Greek text), Dante explicitly condemns the act of homosexuality, though not as severely as he does in Inferno, the prequel. Here, the bog-standard heterosexual hedonists run east to west in the same direction as the sun; against the sun—as, Dante suggests, against “nature” somehow—run homosexuals. Remind me again, is it east or west that Adam is staring at in the opening shot of the film?

Above the mountain of Purgatory is the apex, the Earthly Paradise. The biblical garden of Eden, home of snakes and apples and temptations. Which is strangely positioned for a location envisioned right above the level of lust in Purgatory, if you ask me. And it goes without saying who the original inhabitants of that particular place were. Character names aren’t chosen randomly, and the original novel was Japanese so I doubt the characters share a name in this case. In the film, that suggestion is likely ironic: Adam dreams of living in London as a kid, but now he lives there it seems mundane and disappointing to him. Tedious, even. But symbolically London is the Eden he seeks. But don’t take all this too literally; I chose the heading of this section for a reason.

And End To Suffering

The rejection Harry feels about his family is the engine of his suffering; in life he reactively displaced his love, embracing consumption in the form of alcohol as a compensatory measure, engaging as many people do on a hopeless quest to fill an empty pit, or smother a basic need with some kind of substantive experience instead. Yet misery, loneliness and rejection are not so easily remedied. That process, that misdirected love, has literally cost him his life.

Through their mutual exploration of their respective forms of vulnerability, both Adam and Harry ultimately overcome their feelings of ostracism by learning first to love one another, then by confronting their emotional exile and, finally, by accepting their own selfhood.

There’s a saying that nothing in life worth learning is taught (and nothing worth having is bought), and perhaps nowhere is that maxim so inconsistently applied than in the realm of psychology (and certainly not just in cinema). It’s one thing to intellectually understand a concept, and another thing entirely to actually live it, or practice it. In this sense, Adam is able to process the vicissitudes of his relationship with each of his parents and confront the reality of their permanent absence. He already knows they are dead, but it is the emotional acceptance of their loss that he processes, and which then allows him to see—with, if I recall correctly, their encouragement—what actually matters to him.

This is the tragedy around which the film’s depiction of imperfect love revolves. Just as he lies to his mother about her death (telling her she died instantly, which reassures her, rather than explain that she suffered for several days afterward), so too does his embrace of Harry require him to acknowledge that he has already drunk himself to death; and yet that horrible moment also offers perhaps the most tender and touching embrace in the film.

This is the intersection between the “theory” and the “practice” of emotional, as opposed to intellectual, acceptance of a thing. It is how both Adam and Harry, now separated from many of the shackles of the messy, imperfect, and disappointing, physical existence we all have to endure, can redirect their love appropriately. In accepting the embrace of another, by offering and receiving vulnerability, each acts as a salve against bitterness, to ease the other’s rejection, and in doing so they unify the damaged dasein which drove Harry toward nihilism and which rendered Adam’s life an existential wasteland. Their narrative arcs come together in parallel.

The final moments of the film are a single, extended shot of the two men gently cuddling one another, as the room around them loses focus, colour and light and, finally, the two shrink into a single point of light. That light then merges among various other similar points, much like the symbolic process of ascent into the Empyrean at the culmination of Dante’s Paradiso. That is, the point at which a soul reaches the abode of god.

In this case, of course, the Empyrean should be considered not as some figurative union with a discrete deity as Dante imagined it, but as a release from the confines of Purgatory, into a metaphysical realm of tranquility, beyond which their struggles with all the imperfections of life and of love have led them. As Dante himself put it: “the Love which moves the sun and the other stars”. But as the film would have it, all of us strangers moving through our difficult and often terrifying lives, remade as stars in the sky if we might just reach out and touch one another with that same embrace of discomfort and imperfection, not some mythologised simulacrum to be found cast upon on billboards and lesser films than this one. An embrace of what should really be meant when we say: love.