![]() But Haigh tells this potentially maudlin story with such a light touch that even its biggest reveals hit like a velvet hammer, and his screenplay so movingly echoes Adam’s yearning to be known - across time and space - that the film always feels rooted in his emotional present, even as it pings back and forth between dimensions. Which isn’t to suggest that “All of Us Strangers” isn’t a nuclear-grade tearjerker, because it is most definitely that, especially once Adam’s burgeoning relationship with Harry begins to compound the one he resurrects with his parents. They know they haven’t seen their son in more than 35 years, and, to some unspoken extent, they seem to know why, but speaking it aloud might threaten to break the spell of a film whose lo-fi approach to the afterlife cleaves much closer to the plaintive wistfulness of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “After Life” than it does the violent sentimentality of “Field of Dreams.” ![]() When Adam bumps into his long-dead father on one of those trips, his dad - a mustached Jamie Bell, his stirring performance made all the more powerful by the fact that he’s almost a decade younger than Scott - casually leads him back to his childhood home as if he and Adam’s similarly late mom (Claire Foy) were expecting him for dinner. ![]() By the same token, it’s immediately self-evident that Adam is traveling back in time whenever he visits his old stomping grounds outside of Croydon for research, with the train there serving as a portal to the past. 1987” - is all the context we need to understand what he’s doing with his days: writing a screenplay about coming of age as a closeted tween in the suburbs outside London. Meanwhile, a glimpse at the flashing cursor on his computer screen - “Ext. ![]() ‘Close to You’ Review: Elliot Page Gets Vulnerable in Muddled Coming-of-Self Tale A drunken Harry makes the first move by knocking on Adam’s door one night, a rejected advance that nevertheless sets the stage for a romance that finds both men letting each other in to one extent or another. And wouldn’t you know it, the other renter - Harry - looks an awful lot like Paul Mescal, who plays the part with a sex-forward puckishness that disguises the same pain that it advertises with every glance (no actor on Earth is as good at selling an open wound). Andrew Scott of “Fleabag” fame stars as a lonely gay screenwriter named Adam, who’s all too at home in the eerie new London high-rise where he seems to be one of the only two residents. In that light, it should come as little surprise that Haigh is so well-suited to an ineffably personal ghost story about the absences that can shape our entire lives if we let them.īased on a 1987 Taichi Yamada novel that Haigh’s adaptation has tenderly queered in a way that resonates with his own experience, “ All of Us Strangers” begins with a premise so poignant that even the slightest miscalibration could make the whole thing ring false. Haigh’s simple but penetrating dramas couldn’t be more specific in how they depict the strangeness of intimacy and the intimacy of strangeness, and yet they’re also palpably unfilled in a way, like a half-empty room that someone you were looking for just left. God bless British Andrew Haigh, whose best films - “Weekend,” “45 Years,” and now the quietly shattering “ All of Us Strangers” - are the rare work of a modern director who knows how to get out of their own way.
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