All of Us Strangers – Adriana’s Review

All of Us Strangers is the Sufjan Stevens song of movies. It’s sappy and tender and very gay and very sad. It’s full of ghosts. It’s haunted by loneliness and love.

Some may find it a bit too sentimental, like the 80s power ballads scattered throughout its soundtrack. But I found that it balances those feelings very well, never veering too far into treacly territory. For all of its fantastical elements, it always has one foot on the ground, rooted in feelings that ring true and deep.

I think there’s a reason I keep comparing the movie to music, and that’s because it moves with a fluidity that feels musical, moving in and out of “reality”, and into dreams and fantasy and imagination and memory and drug-induced escapism, until the boundaries between all of the above slip away.

Music plays an important role in the movie, too, emotionally tying Andrew Scott’s Adam to his deceased parents and giving voice to feelings that characters in the movie either can’t or won’t put into words.

Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal give incredible performances here, portraying two men who meet and connect in the near-empty London sky-rise they both live in. Scott is one of the most expressive actors I can think of, and Mescal has found a niche for himself playing soft-spoken young men with barely-contained sadness spilling over behind their eyes, and he’s so good at it. I can’t wait to see him do something wildly different, like a comedy or an action movie (Gladiator 2, let’s goooo). Not because I’ll ever get tired of him playing sad boys, but because he’s such a great actor, and I think it would be fun to see him go against type.

I also have to mention Claire Foy and Jamie Bell as Adam’s parents, both of whom (but especially Foy) give fantastic performances in roles that could have, in other hands, felt somewhat silly or unbelievable but end up being very complex and moving.

Ultimately, this is a profoundly sad and lonely movie, about people who have trouble letting go of the past and letting other people in. At the risk of revealing too much about myself, it’s a movie that spoke to me on a very personal level and moved me to tears in the dark of a theatre full of people.

It’s also a beautiful ode to love—familial love and queer love and the profound impact we can have on the lives of the people around us, if only we allow ourselves to do so.

Verdict

This is a beautiful ghost story about reckoning with the past, moving on, and opening yourself up to love in all its forms, centred around four incredible performances. If you’re a starry-eyed emotional masochist like me, and you love movies about grief and loneliness and sad people, with the aesthetic and emotional vibes of an 80s power ballad, you will probably love this!