All of Us Strangers Movie Review

All of Us Strangers (2023)

Rent All of Us Strangers on Amazon Video (paid link) // Buy the novel (paid link)
Written by: Andrew Haigh, Taichi Yamada (based on the novel 'Strangers' by)
Directed by: Andrew Haigh
Starring: Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy
Rated: R
Watch the trailer

Plot
A screenwriter drawn back to his childhood home enters into a fledgling relationship with his downstairs neighbor while discovering a new way to heal from losing his parents thirty years ago.

Verdict
It's not the typical feature movie. At first glance you may wonder if there's a plot, but this is a narrow focus that's very human. It's death, love, and relationships. This movie is Adam confronting his past and present. We see that mental exercise unfold on screen. It's touching in subject matter, but the way this concludes upends everything. It's fitting in that how we see events are biased because we see this from Adam's point of view. You need distance to see things clearly. This movie provides that vantage so specifically.
Watch it.

Review
There's just something so real about this. It captures feelings and emotions so well without resorting to exposition. This starts with a late night encounter between Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Paul Mescal). Adam brushes him off, but you get the sense he's intrigued or just lonely, but he knows better.

Andrew Scott plays Adam

Compared to the usual movie this has a slow start, but it does a wonderful job of establishing the character. We know Adam is a writer, prone to procrastination. Finding old family photos causes him to visit his family home. This uses no words to develop Adam. While at his old house, we get a prolonged vision of an evening with him and his parents. It gets into a writer's mind. He's crafting stories out of thought fragments. It feels strange, but it's also how he's coped without them by pretending he still has a relationship with his parents. In his mind he can imagine the conversations he wants to have. I wonder if that's why he's more of a loner as he lives inside his mind most of the time. Has this caused difficulty with relationships?

These visions of Adam's family make this hypothetical situation real. We get to see him come out to both of his parents, which has to be cathartic. It seems exactly like something a writer would imagine.

Paul Mescal, Andrew Scott play Harry, Adam

Adam develops the courage to return to Harry. They were both outsiders in their own families, but it seems possible Adam wasn't out before this relationship. We just don't know. We watch their relationship progress through a montage. This is a story about a relationship, but it's also something personal for Adam. He's managing a relationship with Harry and his parents. Does he return to the vision of his parents because it's a safe space or is he hiding? It could just be a way to process his thoughts.

A drug trip turns into something odd. Adam is confused, returning to his old house and mixing visions with reality. This leads into the ending which kicks this movie up a notch. This entire movie is Adam working on his relationships, sexuality, and convictions. He reconciles these things he's tried to ignore. He finds closure, and it feels so fitting that a writer confronts his thoughts in such a method by creating characters to discuss it in something that seems like reality as we watch all of it unfold on screen. I like the movie, but the ending makes the entire thing so much better.