In 1988, a year after the publication of Summer Presences, a fantastically flavored novel by Taichi Yamada, Nobuhiko Obayashi made a faithful adaptation, the horror film The Discarnates. A divorced screenwriter and father met a couple strangely resembling his parents, who died 30 years earlier. However, as his enigmatic neighbor and new conquest assured him, they were malicious ghosts.
In the hands of Andrew Haigh (Lean on Pete, 45 Years), the novel by Yamada (who died at age 89 last November) takes on a completely different twist. In fact, it is as if he continued his reflection on love begun in Weekend (2011), where two men who met in a bar got to know each other after spending a night together, to which he would have added a moving study of grief and childhood trauma. We also find in All of Us Strangers a memorable evening in a bar where alcohol and ketamine disrupt the senses and the perception of reality.
Adam (Andrew Scott), a single and lonely screenwriter, receives a visit from Harry (Paul Mescal), who lives in the same deserted tower block in the suburbs of London. Bottle in hand, the enigmatic young man would like to spend the evening with the forty-year-old, but the latter rejects his advances. Soon after, Adam, who lost his parents in an auto accident 30 years earlier, finds his father (Jaime Bell) and mother (Claire Foy), as they were at the time, in the house where he grew up. Back home, Adam then becomes closer to Harry, with whom he experiences an affair as tender as it is torrid.
Fragments of Adam’s scenario, fantasies, daydreams, recurring dreams, paranormal phenomena? Regardless of the path on which Andrew Haigh wanted to lead the viewer, it is the emotion that prevails throughout this drama where the central character seems to go through life in a somnambulistic state or as if he were a prisoner of an ambient melancholy. Having lost his parents at the start of his puberty, Adam will never know what they would have thought of their son, his career, his direction, the painful secrets he would have hidden from them.
If each encounter turns out to be happy, each is also tinged with an increasingly invasive sadness that grips the heart, as if Adam had the intuition that this could be the last time he makes up for lost time with his parents. .
With irresistible hits from the 1980s, including the Pet Shop Boys’ version of Always on My Mind and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s moving power ballad The Power of Love, Andrew Haigh highlights the childhood nostalgia felt Adam. Anyone who has lost loved ones will appreciate the delicacy and accuracy with which the filmmaker conveys the fear of forgetting their voice, their face, their perfume.
While the drama ends on an unexpected and disturbing note, Andrew Haigh leaves the viewer with his questions about his relationship to death, to the love we have for those who have passed away, as well as to the guilt we can sometimes feel like being alive. Bathed in an enveloping dreamlike atmosphere and carried by an impeccable cast, All of Us Strangers proves to be a daring illustration of the manifestations of mourning.
