"Going back home is always an interesting thing," said Andrew Haigh in a panel discussion on Looking, the HBO TV series of contemporary gay San Francisco life he co-devised. Haigh's radiant latest film, All of Us Strangers, represents a homecoming in several senses. Not only does the film, freely adapted from Taichi Yamada's engaging 1987 novel Strangers, boast an uncanny conceit in which a fortysomething protagonist, returning to his childhood house, finds his deceased parents still living there just as he remembers them - but Haigh also shot the film in his own childhood home in Croydon, adding another psychological layer or two to a work that often suggests a long-delayed therapy session.
Queering Yamada's entirely straight Japanese novel into an English context, All of Us Strangers is also a return to British gay cinema for Haigh, where he began his career with the odd documentary Greek Pete (2008) and his great feature debut Weekend (2011). Following the rather indifferent reaction to his two previous projects, the tough but tender boy-and-horse US road movie Lean on Pete (2017) and the salty sea-bound TV series The North Water (2021), the enthusiastic response to the new film indicates that Haigh has returned to the kind of filmmaking that most critics expect of him (a response which reveals its own uncomfortable truths about media pigeonholing of gay filmmakers).
It can't hurt, either, that in casting the film's central duo he's chosen two of the most popular actors on the planet at present. As the lonely pair who meet and connect in the weirdly empty London tower block they both live in, Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal bring all the feeling, magnetism and chemistry that you'd hope to their characters' developing romance.
Still, the new film doesn't feel like a regressive step: Haigh continues to push himself in new directions with All of Us Strangers while retaining the special sensitivity and intimacy that have always distinguished his work as a filmmaker. Among the fresh elements is the film's dreamy, sensuous texture - equal parts unsettling and comforting - and the otherworldly quality that Jamie D. Ramsay's photography and Sarah Finlay's production design bring to "ordinary" urban and suburban locations. (Here's to the Whitgift Centre!)
For all the changes made to the novel, Haigh's adaptation also brilliantly conveys its sense of interior first-person experience, using expressionistic means to keep us in the headspace of Scott's Adam; the film might be best defined as magical social realism. And Haigh rivals François Ozon in his ability to convey a watchful sense of solitude and set-apartness on screen.
Scott has sometimes seemed overrated: I found his Hamlet impossibly affected and awful. But it's hard to see how he could be bettered here, with every subtle glance and gesture conveying the sadness, confusion and gradual opening up of a protagonist who's shut himself off from an early age due to loss and grief. His attraction to Mescal's younger, more extrovert but mercurial Harry feels fully believable; the actors' performances achieve a beautiful equilibrium throughout.
Attentive to generational shifts in gay male experience - there's a great little moment in which the pair address their different views of the terms "gay" and "queer," which both have experienced as slurs - the film touches the rawest of nerves for gay viewers of a certain age, especially in its even-handed portrait of how even loving parents may inculcate shame and fear in gay offspring by an unthinking adherence to homophobic societal norms.
It's here that the film's "therapeutic" elements are most evident, as, after initial concern and confusion regarding his coming out, Adam's parents bestow beyond-the-grave love and acceptance, strongly recalling the scene in Weekend in which Tom Cullen's Russell comes out to Chris New's Glen as the latter "plays" his father. The film's attention to the ways in which parents and children might at once fail and support each other, its concern to heal and redeem what's been lost or unspoken, gives it a deep, primal resonance. (There's also a meta element, though thankfully unstressed - Adam, a screenwriter, is trying to write about his parents, suggesting a practical dimension to his "conjuring" of them at the family home.)
It helps that, as the very recognisable Mum and Dad, Claire Foy and Jamie Bell inhabit their roles with an amazing straightforwardness and no hints of spectral spookiness. A Christmas tree-decorating sequence in which Foy's quiet singalong to Pet Shop Boys' version of "Always on My Mind" becomes an understated expression of maternal love, is a particular heart-wrencher. It's one of several moments in which the soundtrack serves to enrich our understanding of character and relationships - as well as celebrating the queer culture hiding in plain sight in the British '80s mainstream.
All of Us Strangers is overall a triumph: a deeply emotional, wryly funny and absorbing examination of traumatic loss, love, loneliness, and parent/child bonds. An intimate family drama, a tender and sexy love story, and an immersive psychological portrait that risks a surprise revelation and a cosmic climax in its final, Frankie-scored frames, Haigh's beautiful film ushers all of its viewers into a shimmering space between pain and consolation.
All of Us Strangers is released in the UK on 26 January and in Poland on 9 February.
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