Review: All of Us Strangers is the finest movie of the year
Towards the end of All of Us Strangers – the exquisite new film from writer-director Andrew Haigh, based upon a novel by Taichi Yamada – Adam (played by the beautiful, elegant Andrew Scott) makes a distressing and heartbreaking discovery while exploring an unfamiliar room in his near-vacant apartment building.
As Adam enters this room, Haigh and cinematographer Jamie M. Ramsay linger over his shocked expression. The camera places him at right, with negative space hovering between his gaze and that terrible surprise, to the left, which is physically out of frame.
For a time, watching this shot, which lasts for quite a while, I cowered in my seat. I did not want to see whatever it was that Adam was looking at. I sensed what it was, and did not need to see it. I directed my eyes toward the corner of the auditorium, with the theater screen in my peripheral, to avoid direct engagement with the terrible thing once Mr. Haigh finally cut to it.
Yet he never did cut to it. The shot continued, focused entirely on Adam, until he stepped closer towards the terrible thing. At that point, just enough of the thing appeared in frame to confirm my suspicions. But neither Haigh nor Ramsay subjected me or anyone else in the audience to the gratuity, to the shock of that thing which Adam had uncovered. They never forced it on us.
I can’t begin to express my admiration for Mr. Haigh’s choice. It is a rare thing for a filmmaker to refrain from showing something carnal or violent onscreen – to not, in fact, seek out an opportunity to do so. Usually, whenever someone is attacked or killed or found dead in movies, it is an elaborate tableau of guts and blood.
Not so here. Like everything else in All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh handles the difficult or crushing moments with grace. He honors his characters’ dignity, and allows them room to remain embodied. Without dismemberment, or voyeuristic exploitation.
I’m tempted to say that this relationship to visual material represents a distinctly gay point of view. Mr. Haigh is gay, as is Adam, as is the man who plays him; this is in and of itself an unusual configuration for a Hollywood movie: to have maker, character, and performer alike all identify as gay. It means that many of the common reference points cherished by male directors – fetishized women, aggressive behavior, combative worldviews – fall by the wayside.
In their place? A regard for male beauty. Slow, contemplative action. Healing, not conquest, as the primary objective.
It may be an oversimplification to say so, but I regard All of Us Strangers as the best in what queer commercial filmmaking might offer: delicacy, honesty, and human consideration. I agree with everything that Andrew Haigh says and does in this movie.
And while we’re extolling exemplars in queer artistry, let’s delegate some verbiage to Mr. Andrew Scott. It may simply be that I identify with his character – a gay man who spends most of his time alone, writing screenplays and mulling over his past – but I consider this the gentlest, most alluring of performances. He emits the modest gentility of James Mason; he blinks and breathes with gentlemanly yet frank clarity. He is gorgeous.
And he is flanked by Paul Mescal, as his lover, matched by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, as his parents. All reached for, all tentatively available to him. All resplendent performers, all present for their roles. Their individual beauty coalesces in a collective, intimate grandeur. I am in love with them all, and I am in love with the process of healing Adam undertakes as he encounters them.
All of Us Strangers is basically a chamber drama, unfolding in one man’s imagination. Its disciplined humility expands with the skyline outside Adam’s window, so that what functions as a limited portrait of grief becomes epic. It is harrowing and reassuring all at once.
A blessing, this. I respect it. I am grateful it exists.
