All of Us Strangers (2023)

A lonely gay man summons beloved yesterdays to still his troubles today

Both searching, Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Paul Mescal) forge a vital connection

All of Us Strangers (2023)

In theaters and streaming on Hulu

I’m always on the lookout for gay movies whose characters live and breathe, and don’t just lament or screech.  As a gay man I’m heartened when, on screen, straight audiences get a real-world depiction of gay men or women struggling to live their best lives.

Happily, the soaring All of Us Strangers has arrived to show us that a dismissive phrase like “the gay lifestyle” won’t get you anywhere near the inner life of an actual gay person.

Take Adam (Andrew Scott), a TV scriptwriter in London whose career seems to be floundering.  We first see him at home in front of his computer trying and failing to write a scene.

Within moments he gives up.  In the handsome Scott’s facial non-expressiveness, Adam even looks lonely.

We quickly learn one reason why.  From an exterior nighttime view of his giant new residential tower, we see that his is the only apartment with a light on.  Is he the building’s only tenant?  No, he has one neighbor.

One night Adam strolls out onto the lawn in front of the building, looks up and sees a light in another apartment window.  Harry (Paul Mescal) smiles down at him.  They give each other a hesitant wave.

Soon after, Harry, carrying a half-empty whiskey bottle, knocks on Adam’s door.  Adam, seeing that his neighbor is obviously smashed, politely declines to invite him in.

Harry, knowing he’s blown it, tries again a night or two later, this time toting a bottle of sparkling water, and swears he’s only hoping two bereft neighbors can give each other a bit of company.  Adam, still wary but curious, lets him in.

It doesn’t take long for them to size each other up as gay, and the two unattached men unsurprisingly grab the chance to share some friendly sex.  It needs to be pointed out at once that the movie’s few sex scenes are so discreetly shot and acted, they don’t occasion a ripple of discomfort.

Not that Adam and Harry going at it doesn’t carry an erotic charge.  It does.  Yet right away their hookup hints at a longing that’s more than physical.

Here the movie takes its strange, surreal turn.  After fondly sorting through old photos of his family home in a nearby suburb, Adam decides to visit the house, which he hasn’t laid eyes on since his parents died in an auto accident some 30 years before, when Adam was 12.

He’s warmed and flooded with nostalgia simply seeing the place again.  When he comes back at night, his mind turns time – and the movie – in on itself.

Out of the past, Adam’s Dad (Jamie Bell) and Mum (Claire Foy) delight in their son

At the door he’s greeted, to his astonishment, by his Mum (Claire Foy), looking just as she did some 30 years ago, in the months before the auto accident killed her.  To Adam’s amazement, she instantly knows him, is blissful to see him all grown up, and hungrily invites him in.

Who should be inside but Dad (Jamie Bell)?  He too looks as he did 30 years before, and he’s also not the least bit shocked by his son’s reappearance – indeed he’s thrilled to see him tall and grown up.

Is this a lot of hoodoo?  No, the movie’s crisp cinematography signals us, just go with it.  The warm coziness suggests that maybe sometimes self-acceptance needs an intense backward glance.  Uncannily, this renewed family “relationship” continues.

Adam keeps revisiting his parents of 30 years before, bringing them up to date on his life and telling them with blushing, nearly childish fervor, how much he’s missed them.  And, of course, how overjoyed he is to have them back.

They’re enraptured, too, but that 30-year gap needs filling, and disturbing truths will out.  Mum asks if Adam has a girlfriend and is shocked to learn her son has turned out to be gay.  Dad gently voices his regret, too.  But both are willing to see their newly recovered son as he is, never mind what they might have wished.

Of course, we think, this is all a fantasy that’s bound to come crashing down.  Adam, clinging to it, invites Harry to share it.  But their relationship is going through warps of its own, because they’re both chary of their increasing closeness.

Inevitably in all this friction, past and present collide. Harry, mired in substance abuse, crying for help, needs Adam now. Their present won’t wait. Will Adam understand that in time?

This is a gay-themed story that finally doesn’t hinge on the gayness of Adam and Harry, hard as both of them have struggled to accept their sexual identity.

What I’ve written here isn’t entirely a review or an appraisal.

My words amount to a meditation on the movie’s attempt to put gay life to the sternest tests.  The need for love, and the missed opportunities when any of us, gay or straight, lose or squander it, is what propels this movie.

They actually want to celebrate it, and that’s how the movie’s turn to “fantasy” reveals its real subject:  the terror, and fragility, of intimate connections.

With courage, Adam could pursue the act of loving not just in the past but today, in the here and now, with Harry.  And Harry, adrift in the fog of booze and drugs, has someone right in front of him he could cherish. Both men stand poised at the edge of transformative love.

Scott gives a startlingly exact performance, steeped in bewilderment and newfound joy.  You feel him growing both wiser and sadder as he confronts the parents he actually no longer has, but who might be able to re-endow him with valor and self-respect.

Mescal makes Harry, sad and dissolute, both fretful and endearing as he tries to rise above sensation and pleasure, to be more to Adam than a mesmerizing hedonist.  The actor gives Harry a charm and sensual pull that bring us, like Adam, to hope the man inside the body will come into himself, treat his flesh like the gateway it could be to an enduring connection.

Foy and Bell, as Mum and Dad, are utterly disarming, so recognizable as mother and father to a hurting son.  Doting parents, they don’t take long to see that Adam is despondent.

Yet they bestow on him their pride for all he’s overcome, even though they didn’t live to see it.   They can accept him for precisely the still struggling, yearning man he is now.

Mum (Claire Foy) re-embracing Adam (Andrew Scott) as her grown up gay son

This beautiful movie never feels spooky, like a ghost story.  Working from the 1987 novel Strangers, by Taichi Yamada, writer-director Andrew Haigh has made a complex journey across time feel as wrenching yet familiar as thumbing through an old family photo album.  He gives “realism” an inner light that’s raw and tender at the same time.

Jamie Ramsay’s cinematography is handsome and silkily dexterous.  His lens can fade to a hallucinatory haze when Adam and Harry visit a noisy nightclub. Then in a single cut his camera snaps back to the vital “facts” of Adam’s enticing meetings with his parents that are keeping his hopes alive.

Fine as the movie is by any fair standard, I have to acknowledge that what I’ve written here isn’t entirely a review or an appraisal.

My words amount to a meditation, if you will, on the movie’s attempt to put gay life to the sternest tests.  The need for love, and the missed opportunities when any of us, gay or straight, lose or squander it, is what undergirds this movie.

Mum and Dad are healing the suffering adult Adam as surely as he’s revitalizing his tie to them.  They’re not lost after all and can help him find his better self.

Today’s national – and indeed the world’s – roils and perils make me feel protective of what Haigh and company have achieved here, which is so delicate yet so urgently truthful.

I believe its avowal of transcendence is something new in movies seeking to tell gay stories. I’m not just pleased by it and respectful toward it but deeply touched by its heartfelt, plainspoken wisdom.