Review: "All of Us Strangers" Is a Thoughtful Inspiration to Accept Life's Tragedies

Andrew Haigh delivers a heartbreaking knockout in this honest, forthright drama.

January 27, 2024

Overcorrection is the death of art, exploratory discussion, and the necessary challenges to antiquated perspectives that inspire genuine change. Echo chamber liberals always insist they know best, and the more performative, misguided sect of whatever group they’re speaking for at that moment unjustly lend credence to the notion that what they say is of value.

As such, we’ve beheld countless controversies over the telling of minority stories by majority storytellers, particularly straight actors, writers, and directors telling LGBT tales. It’s a fallacious argument; we cannot grow as one unless we all walk a proverbial mile in another's shoes.

On the other hand, there is merit to insisting that someone with the experience to tell a story most truthfully be given top priority, and occasionally one does so with such expertise that the more extremist argument feels (for a couple of hours) legitimized.

On June 5, 1981, the CDC published its findings on the cluster of pneumonia cases affecting gay men in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. It was a medical anomaly that soon became a worldwide epidemic: HIV, an incurable, sexually transmitted (usually) infection that eventually progressed to AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), a terminal illness.

The resulting panic cast homosexual men in an even more unfavorable light. It was only in 1961 that Illinois became the first US state to decriminalize homosexuality, and 1967 that the Sexual Offenses Act legalized private homosexual acts in the United Kingdom. Homosexuality was still very taboo in the Western world; the belief that gay men carried a life-ending virus did not help matters.

It also instilled fear within a generation of young gay men that their finally legalized sexual expression was effectively a death sentence, encouraging the same fear and secrecy that forced so many gay men into the closet for decades.

Telling the story of those fears at all is a tall task. Making them feel tangible without dominating the narrative is an even taller one. Making everyone - whether a contemporary LGBT generation predominantly ignorant of the severity of the AIDS crisis or heterosexual viewers equally unaware of what it means to grow up gay - understanding of what it means to live with such fear, not only of yourself but of what the people you loved most would think if they could see you now, is nearly impossible.

Yet, All of Us Strangers pulls it off.

The movie has one of the shortest castlists you’ll ever see: only four people realize the emotional vision behind a deeply personal story, and each rises to the occasion. If you’ve ever had a well-intentioned but socially underdeveloped mother, Claire Foy will conjure memories equally painful and soothing. If you’ve ever had a distant but quietly loving father, Jamie Bell will stir your subconscious with as much compassion as frustration. If you’ve ever fallen in love with the maturity necessary to understand what it truly means to be vulnerable with someone and open your heart and world to them, Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal will be two (very handsome) mirrors.

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One can also point to the cinematography, lit darkly with a sense of being covered and hidden, slowly getting illuminated, like the slow burn of Adam’s acceptance of his parents’ death enlightens his present life. It's always intimate and tight, giving us as close a look as possible into the newfound intimacy Adam experiences with Harry and the emotional rollercoaster of reconciling his losses and the realizations to which he arrives as the conversations with his parents run deeper.

But no matter how well it presents itself and how flawlessly it weaves its stylistic choices into its emotional ambitions, those ambitions are the film’s calling card. Few movies are this forthright about tragedy, usually seeking to sanitize the fantasy instead of confronting that even in our wildest imaginations, we cannot ignore what we know to be true. Our lives ordinarily take on a superior version of their presence state; we rarely let ourselves imagine with the reckless abandon that colored our childhood dreams.

Why? Simply put, it seems unattainable, and frankly, it is. Although we’d love to believe that the lost moments with departed loved ones would bring closure, we cannot convince ourselves of what we know is untrue. Adam’s parents were from a different time, one with its own values, ideals, and principles. People can change, but they must get the opportunity. Adam’s parents never did. The people he knew died before they could see the world change, so they can only speak to him as people from the one he last saw them in.

His mother, though generally well-intentioned, cannot detach herself from what the AIDS crisis meant for a gay man in the '80s or the archaic ideas of sexuality that governed contemporary perceptions. All of Us Strangers smartly prevents her from outright condemnation or forced acceptance; it’s a commonplace experience that most movies ignore in favor of manipulative extremes. People often don’t know what to say, how to feel, or how to push the needle forward; 1987 people cannot become 2024 people simply because we want them to.

Even in the nuances of these discussions, the movie understands how to portray its characters’ circumstances. Adam hoped his parents would embrace his sexuality, but the desire to see them again dominated his thoughts; his mother’s resistance catches him off guard. He has lived truthfully for too long to retract under his mother’s trepidations, but he's still hesitant to broach the subject directly and balance the man he is with the boy who’s talking to his mother.

It seems an impossible balance to strike, making Adam as much a grown man navigating his present life as a pre-adolescent grappling with his parents’ death, but the movie finds it. Adam probes his father about why, during all the nights he could hear him crying in his room, he did not comfort his son, and his father responds with a question, deflecting the issue in the same breath he displays so painfully the issue itself. Adam holds firm, refusing to answer until his father does.

Parents usually fail for one of two reasons: they’re laser-focused on not making the same mistakes as their parents and wind up making their own, or they project themselves too much onto their child. Adam’s father was the latter, so despite him not being a bad father, he has fundamentally failed his son. When he tells Adam he likely would’ve tormented him the same way his childhood bullies did, and that realization kept him from finding the words to reassure his child, the adult willing to stand tall crumbles into the boy who needed his father.

Even in the Christmas scene, where the tension from Adam’s earlier conversation with his mother fills the air, he cannot bring himself to make excuses or fight for her approval, and that feels just as much a product of his adult self’s inability to apologize for his truth as his inner child’s need to maintain the facade. He is just as much the man creating a final memory with his parents as the boy sitting on the ground, staring up at his beloved mother and father with a childlike smile.

It all comes to a head when Adam, dressed in his childhood pajamas, enters his parents’ bedroom. His mother needs to know that everything she missed, all that Adam lost, didn’t scar him too much to move forward, and Adam gives her that reassurance by cycling through the fantasies on which he lived as he grappled with their deaths. They did make it to Disneyland; he did have a life with them, even if it was only in his dreams. Adam has to comfort her as he explains his life after they passed, but she never forgets to return the favor. In many ways, they are parent and child to each other; Adam’s ability to reconcile this pain comes with the understanding that his parents were people, the same realization that allows us all to rectify the pain of the past.

Meanwhile, he develops a deep romantic attachment to Harry, the handsome, troubled younger man living in his apartment building. Anyone similarly aged would’ve created a strained mentor-mentee dynamic, but anyone younger than Harry would’ve felt contrived and made Adam feel too immature to appreciate the opportunity before him. The pair’s cross-generational affair, each fixed in their exact generation (Adam as late Gen-X and Harry as late millennial), provides Adam with the door-opening someone closer to his age couldn’t give.

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The contrast between Adam’s fears as he grappled with puberty during the onset of the AIDS crisis and Harry’s experiences with a more accepting world and safely experienced sexuality (though still laced with prejudice) legitimize their ability to be transformative for one another. The urgency with which Adam embraces his newfound liberation and the progression in his relationship with his parents reminds Harry that, despite his family situation, love and support are possible. Adam learns that living truthfully doesn’t mean loss and damnation, but both still have wounds from more difficult times that the other needs to help them heal.

It’s disappointing, then, to realize that although he’s finally accepted his parents’ death and answered all the burning questions about who he’d be to them now, as his true self, he cannot transfer that to Harry. As Adam goes to see Harry following his tearful farewell to his mom and dad, the scene goes dark, telegraphing the tragedy Adam finds when he enters Harry’s apartment and opens his bedroom door.

It’s an emotional gut punch the movie doesn't earn. The story was of a man who used each step in the healing of his childhood trauma to take one in his life as a gay man. The only truthful conclusion would be offering not necessarily a neat ending but yet another open door for Adam, ready to embrace that not all love means loss and, on his power, make something out of what he always feared most. By insisting on moroseness, the movie spends its final moments robbing him of the agency he’d earned.

One could argue there’s an even deeper meaning in Adam using his newfound ability to accept loss to more aptly grapple with Harry’s death and help his lover’s spirit peacefully transition to the afterlife, but they’d lose. It’s the typical overreach of all indie films to mistake incessant sadness for profundity. Adam didn’t need a guarantee, only the opportunity to have everything he’d just experienced actually mean something.

Regardless, we reflect on All of Us Strangers with an appreciation for when a gay man gets free rein to tell a story he knows best. It’s how it delivers such truthful conversations between Adam and his parents, develops a moving, cross-generational romance that heals what each of their worlds damaged, and how, at the end, even if we know its ending could’ve been better, we still feel that a man with so much life left to live managed to be, to the man he loves, something he failed to be to himself all his life.

We do need gay creators to tell gay stories, not only because they have the experience necessary to make them feel truthful, removed from the melodrama that colors most of its genre, but also because, if they have the talent and earnestness, they naturally avoid the histrionics that fail to remind us that within the things that make us different, we find what makes us all the same. Adam is gay, and that’s an undeniable part of his story, but no one can look back on their losses, whether parents, grandparents, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, or friends, and wonder if the person they’ve become and what once hidden truths they now embrace, would shatter what they held dear if illuminated.

All of Us Strangers is a gay story, but within that reality is the knowledge that it is also a human story absent label or affectation. We need that: to remember that those different from ourselves have an altered experience from which we can learn. Few movies could make that truth feel pertinent without being preachy. Few could be so sincere without feeling manipulative. Few could make us realize that, underneath everything, we are not strangers at all.