Andrew Haigh’s drama of youth and haunted adulthood
ALL OF US STRANGERS Various cinemas
IN THORNTON WILDER’S PLAY Our Town (1938), Emily Webb, recently dead, has the opportunity to relive some of her life. Advised not to choose too momentous an occasion, whose emotional impact might be too much for her, she settles for the day she turned twelve. It’s still too much. Her parents are so young and beautiful. The unsuspected richness of the lives around her – “so all that was going on and we never noticed!” – makes her cut the visit short. Or perhaps it’s not too much for her but too little, since her parents don’t register her presence but carry on regardless, despite her pleas: “Oh Mama, just look at me one minute as if you really saw me.”
There are no such difficulties for Adam (Andrew Scott), the hero of Andrew Haigh’s new film, All of Us Strangers, when he revisits the neighbourhood where he grew up until he was twelve and his parents died. His parents turn out still to be living in their old house. They’re unchanged by the years, and apparently unfazed by meeting a son who is no longer younger than them. In fact they’re eager to catch up on old times, and new times too.
The impossible first encounter between the telescoped generations, crucial for the success of the film, is brilliantly handled, with warm lighting and syncopated editing meshing with naturalistic acting to dispel the inherent eeriness of the situation. Mum (Claire Foy) and Dad ( Jamie Bell) don’t pretend to understand the mechanism that allows them to communicate with their son, but they don’t need to – any more, I suppose, than you need to understand the workings of a telephone to receive a call.
In Taichi Yamada’s source novel for All Of Us Strangers, less portentously titled Strangers (1987), the parents mysteriously surviving in a seedy part of Tokyo are in fact ghosts sapping the hero’s vitality, parasites who accelerate his ageing. In Haigh’s reconfiguring they make possible a healing process, a sort of supernatural course of family therapy.
Adam is a screenwriter, though creatively blocked, as an opening montage of brooding and attempts at distraction makes clear. This is the part of his life that seems haunted, if only by absence and lack of human connection. The immediate impetus for the trip to suburbia was finding some photographs from his childhood, though (as often happens in books and films with writer heroes) there’s also the possibility that he’s doing research for a personal project. His life has just begun to change, with the start of a relationship with Harry (Paul Mescal), another tenant – seemingly the only other one – in his high-rise London block of flats. As the present comes alive, so, perhaps, does the past.
The sexual ele
