Haunting ‘All of Us Strangers’ Is a Perfect Holiday Movie

A low-key high-wire act of emotional delicacy and devastating power, All of Us Strangers is a perfect holiday movie. For adults in a certain mood, that is, for whom Christmas (or the winter solstice) opens a bittersweet portal for remembering and revisiting deceased relatives, friends and lovers.

All of Us Strangers (opening Dec. 25 in the Bay Area) also speaks eloquently to anyone feeling alone or alienated at this particular juncture and who hankers, even tentatively, for the company of a kindred spirit. It’s one of my favorite films of the year, so let me be even more inviting: This is a splendid movie for people who love concise storytelling and precise filmmaking steeped start to finish in mystery and ambiguity.

Adapted from the 1987 novel Strangers written by the Japanese television dramatist and author Taichi Yamada (who died in late November at 89) and transposed by writer-director Andrew Haigh to a familiar yet slightly off England, All of Us Strangers centers on a single gay man in his 40s who has chosen — or gradually, infinitesimally defaulted to — a life of isolation.

We could call it a life of the mind (without the hothouse Hollywood hysteria of Barton Fink), for Adam (Andrew Scott) is a screenwriter, an erstwhile inventor of worlds. All of Us Strangers begins in his apartment in a new, weirdly uninhabited high-rise on the outskirts of a strangely twilit London. Did the apocalypse happen this week? That would explain why there’s nothing in his fridge except leftover takeout.

You may recall that Brendan Gleeson’s character in 2022’s terrific year-end U.K. import, The Banshees of Inisherin, lived in a house on the island’s shore facing the mainland of Ireland — which he never visited. Adam gazes out his London window with the same combination of unspoken attraction and trepidation.

In short order, however, Adam’s doorbell rings and the only other resident presents himself. Harry (Paul Mescal, the breakout star of last year’s Aftersun) is tipsy, dodgy and needy, and we are relieved when Adam declines to invite the younger man in for a drink. But they run into each other a couple days later in the elevator lobby — a less fraught location — and eventually one thing leads to another.

Meanwhile, triggered by a packet of family snapshots he stumbled across, Adam makes a pilgrimage by train to his suburban childhood home. Once there, Haigh plausibly guides Adam, in a beautifully constructed piece of visual filmmaking, to a totally implausible destination: a reunion with his parents, fixed forever in their early 30s.

All of Us Strangers allows viewers resistant to supernatural forces or themes to entertain various logical explanations for this and subsequent meetings between Adam and his late father and mother (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, both extraordinary). Adam is having a fever dream, or a ketamine nightmare. Or everything that’s happening, including his intoxicating romance with Harry, is the product of his imagination — that is, a screenplay he is writing.

I am one of those literal moviegoers who craves real-world reasons for otherworldly occurrences, yet I dove headlong into the parents-child relationship. I am always rooting for reconciliation in movies, I confess, and nothing makes me more emotional than characters hearing (or saying) what they need to hear or say.

I could add the qualification that the characters must earn it, and the filmmaker has to handle it with a modicum of sentimentality. You may not be surprised that the key conversations in All of Us Strangers involve Adam’s homosexuality and his parents’ late-to-the-party acceptance. The pitch and tenor of these scenes, steeped in the ordinariness of domestic life, sharpens the stakes to a degree where you may not be aware you are holding your breath.

Instead of a high-wattage star turn, Andrew Scott (Professor Moriarty on PBS’s Sherlock, The Priest on Fleabag) gives us an Everyman whose veneer of self-protective cautiousness dissolves under the influence of tolerance and acceptance. There’s some pent-up grief in there, to be sure, which Scott conveys as personal and individual and which Haigh expands, in my view, to encompass every gay man who has died of AIDS.

Haigh (Lean on Pete, 45 Years, Weekend) spotlights songs by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and The Pet Shop Boys that take us back to the peak of the plague. We can infer that Adam is not only grieving the death of his parents at a young age but the subsequent losses of friends and lovers. The London that Adam sees in the distance from his upper-floor window is, in fact, a post-apocalypse landscape.

From this vantage point, All of Us Strangers is simultaneously a eulogy and an act of healing. But even if you don’t embrace my big-picture musings, you will not be unmoved by the four characters’ conversations. Heart-to-hearts are an important part of the holidays, in my fantasy world, so I’ll double down: All of Us Strangers, buttressed by a poignant tree-trimming scene, is a holiday movie.

‘All of Us Strangers’ opens Dec. 25, 2023.