Will Sorg-

Andrew Haigh is not interested in conventional love. Haigh, who’s an openly gay filmmaker from the United Kingdom, has been making films about outsiders finding love for decades. His breakout film Weekend follows two men as they fall for each other during a weekend fling. This year his film, All Of Us Strangers, premiered – and it is a truly incredible experience. Over the years, Haigh has perfected a very unobtrusive directorial style. He is capable of truly beautiful filmmaking, yet it almost never feels like he is trying. There’s an innate understanding of the craft that he pulls off so well that if you didn’t know better, you would think that Haigh simply wakes up with an already completed movie and turns it into the studios for showing. He has such a hard-to-quantify talent that I think the only way to fully do it justice is to really dig into what makes his newest movie his best work yet.

I was lucky to see All of Us Strangers at the Twin Cities Film Festival this October. Watching the film with a full theater at a premiere event was an incredible experience and only helped bring out Haigh and his crew’s fantastic work. The film is a contemplative look into a lonely screenwriter named Adam. Adam, played by the fantastic Andrew Scott, lives in an almost empty high-rise apartment building in London. The only other person in the building is a young man named Harry; the two almost immediately begin a relationship. Their meeting and eventual romance is only one half of the movie. Adam’s current project as a writer is about his parents, who died when he was only 11 years-old. While he is stuck in the middle of writer’s block, Adam ends up visiting his childhood home only to discover that when he goes back there, he can visit his parents exactly as they were before their deaths.

What follows is an immaculate story about male romance, queer trauma, and the way our past haunts the present. Much of the story is left intentionally unexplained – even Adam isn’t sure why he can visit his parents. Whatever confusion that might bring to a viewer is eclipsed by the astonishing amount of depth that can be found in the film. Within the movie, there is an important through line of finding comfort and self-acceptance within the confines of one’s identity. Adam as a character feels very introspective and much like a man taking the time to finally process how his world has rapidly changed. Adam is filled with unprocessed grief. He lived through the AIDS epidemic, he never got a chance to come out to his parents while they were still alive, and he admits to having never really been in love before. There is this constant feeling that the second his parents died, he went into autopilot and was never fully aware of how he was changed by that event.

This is what makes his parents getting to meet him as an adult so powerful. They get to see their son in a way that they never truly had a chance to see. Adam gets moments with them that he imagined in his head for decades but never truly had a chance to actualize. There is a profound beauty in their reunion, but there also is a deep pain that comes from Adam never getting the chance for these moments to play out naturally. In countless moments, even though he is now older than his parents ever were, it feels like he has become the child he was right before he lost them. The actors all masterfully play with the nuances of the situation and it leads to plenty of hilarious moments along with some truly devastating scenes.

I think, above all, this is a film that takes its title very literally. It is about the strangers, the people who feel as though they don’t belong anywhere. It is a cry of empathy for the outcasts and the lonely hearts who haven’t felt love since their mother comforted them late at night after a bad dream. I believe that it also serves as a representation of a kind of fulfilled desire for parental reconciliation. Adam’s parents’ death could very well serve as an allegory for the trauma and loss many LGBTQ+ individuals feel when their parents are incapable of accepting their identity. Of course, a masterpiece tale of gay love and generational healing sounds like a lofty goal for the film to accomplish. It may even seem like this could be one of those classic “Oscar Bait” films that touts essential messages for our time. Instead, it does not at all try to be important. Instead, it simply is. I would argue that it could end up being one of the most important films of this decade.

I am enraptured by this movie. I am taken in by Adam and Harry’s romance, something I have not talked much about but is essential when looking deeper into the film’s themes. I am in awe of the perfect performances by every single cast member. This is a movie that demonstrates why film is such a wonderful medium. It feels like a soft caress in the middle of a thunderstorm. It breaks down the viewer’s defenses through its achingly human story and in the end, you are left awestruck by what plays out in front of you. The movie’s importance is not derived from its message or themes or even its acting. All it does is make the strangers who watch it feel a little more seen, and to me, that is an indescribable feeling.