Grief can be as beautiful as it is soul-crushing. Each person is surrounded by ghosts: loved ones, old friends and places that exist now only in memory. Or do they? Director Andrew Haigh explores, and reckons with, this question of ghosts that follow us in his recently released fantasy/romance film, “All of Us Strangers.”
The film follows Adam (Andrew Scott), a lonely, middle-aged writer living in London, in a ghost story about childhood, queerness, grief and loneliness.
“All of Us Strangers” is riddled with complex feelings and multiple realities. It seeks to explore grief over the course of time, while following Adam through various scenes from his childhood and disorienting, dreamlike vignettes of his current life.
The film begins with Adam rebuffing the drunken advances of one of the few other people that live in his building, Harry (Paul Mescal). However upon meeting again, Harry and Adam begin a relationship that grows quickly from sexual to deeply emotional. The two men bond over the specific brand of queer isolation they feel, as well as a lack of support from anyone else in their lives.
As Adam grows closer to Harry, he attempts to share a secret he’s been keeping: he’s been visiting with the ghosts of his parents, appearing just as they were in his childhood home before they died when Adam was 12.
As Adam meets with his parents, he is able to share aspects of his life he was never able to. Although Adam’s parents are stuck in their own time in many ways, he is able to share parts of himself and make peace with various childhood traumas. By having a second chance to speak with the dead, he is able to live more peacefully with himself.
As Adam tries to introduce his ghostly parents to Harry, he is seemingly mortified at Adam’s claims and runs away in confusion.
Adam later makes up with Harry and lets his parents move on after accepting they cannot be with him forever.
The true twist (and major spoiler) for the film comes at the end, when Adam arrives back at his apartment building after saying goodbye to his parents. He enters Harry’s apartment and finds Harry’s corpse, just as it was on the night that Harry was drunk at Adam’s door in the beginning.
Harry then appears and asks Adam why no one had found his body yet, as he had been there since the night Adam rejected him. Adam, already dealing with grief, simply lays with Harry in bed. The final shot of the movie zooms out from them into a night full of stars.
“All of Us Strangers” is a confusing film in some respects, but emotionally, it more than resonates. Was Harry a ghost? Was he only an illusion created by Adam to deal with grief? Were Adam’s parents’ ghosts ever really there?
These questions don’t matter so much in the end. What matters is love’s ability to get people through impossible times in our lives. Although the film is deeply heartbreaking on many fronts, and perhaps offers no ending or explanation, Adam’s story of chasing after love and closure is something extremely powerful.
Andrew Haigh’s hazy, heavy and unconventional ghost story is one that won’t be forgotten soon.
Grief often has no end, but neither does the love the world, and perhaps the world beyond, has to offer. If ghosts are real, maybe they are all around us, guiding us through the hardships and hurts of daily life until we all become one with the stars.
