I went to see All Of Us Strangers, a metaphysical gay romance starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, loosely based on a Japanese novel from 1987. It’s about a lonely writer living in London who discovers he has the ability to visit and talk to his parents, who died in a car crash decades ago.
Andrew Scott is really excellent as usual, he’s a phenomenal talent. (A friend messages me: “I wish my job was to snog Paul Mescal and get paid for it.”) The rest of the cast are good too. The film is more political than I expected, but not preachy; there is an intelligent discussion of the relative merits of calling yourself “gay” versus “queer”, and the way in which both have been used as an insult in straight culture; two characters from different generations each take a side and make their argument well. There is a subtle point made via the extensive use of period-specific music that, for all the 1980s were a less tolerant era for gay men in the UK, we had a far richer gay culture then than we do now - with acts like Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Erasure and The Pet Shop Boys making mainstream pop music that was interesting, genuinely countercultural and openly gay without being sanitized or stereotypical. (What do we have now - Olly Alexander?)
Much of the film is a comparison of what things were like for gay men growing up in the 1980s versus what they’re like now: what has changed and what hasn’t, and whether we’re lying to ourselves about the realities of gay life in the present day. While elements of this rang true for me (like the main character’s sensitivity and fear of fireworks, and his parents’ concern at his lack of masculinity), the fact my own family background is so different to the one shown in the film meant I didn’t relate to it as much as I expected to. As such, I liked All Of Us Strangers but didn’t love it. If the script has a problem, it’s that the characters are too obviously ciphers and lack specificity; Andrew Scott’s protagonist is a default 2020s urban gay writer and his parents are a default 1980s English suburban couple. All of them feel too generic to be real people, and we actually learn very little about the protagonist’s life. This is compounded by the twist ending, which I saw coming and think was possibly the worst way to end the story.
While the film explores gay loneliness, it lays the blame for this in the wrong place. Put simply, I’m tired of gay media blaming straight culture, heteronormativity and homophobia for gay men’s problems when the way gay men treat each other is a far bigger problem - and no, the former is not the cause of the latter. The end of the film attempts to blame Andrew Scott’s character (and by extension his upbringing) for a decision he made at the start of the film because he was “too scared”, implying this fear was the product of his heteronormative childhood during the height of the AIDS crisis. However, I think his decision was absolutely the right one, that he was wary for entirely rational reasons that have very little to do with this. Sometimes when gay men keep each other at arm’s length, it isn’t because of internalized homophobia and fear of intimacy but because of red flags and the wisdom of self-preservation, just the same as for any other two people.
What’s missing, particularly towards the end, is any practical aspect showing how gay men can overcome past trauma and build meaningful relationships and communities with each other. Instead, we’re left with a beautiful tragedy, a tone poem mired in a morass of grief... but grief that feels overly elegant and artificial instead of truly earned.
Just got out of the theatre from seeing this. I thought Haigh scored high again. He works so well with actors, giving them lots of space. Scott was perfect.
You’re right about the character being a cipher with a rather generic pair of parents. That leaves interpretations of motives wide open. It’s the kind of movie that will change on subsequent viewings. I wasn’t even thinking of a cause for the writer’s anxiety, I thought it was just a characteristic. Because I was that anxious kid, and I came of age just as HIV/AIDS emerged (Welcome to the Pleasuredome came out during my graduating year of high school), so I just thought, yeah that happens to people. I didn’t associate with his heteronormativity or any current hobby horses.
But the anxiety did inform his choice at the end, and made it even sadder than the (unsurprising) twist. He finally accepted the loss of his parents only to hang onto a newer different ghost. The fantasy in the comfort, and he’ll only remain isolated and alone for whatever reason.