‘It doesn’t take much to make you feel the way you felt back there again.’
When moving to a city as a young person, you semi-unknowingly sign some sort of social contract. A new start, a new chance to be you with the seemingly endless array choices and a smorgasbord of new people. For those who arrive from a smaller town and/or fall into any number of categories of other, this is an enticing opportunity. A chance to craft an image, a home and a life away from the meerkat-like gaze of smaller town living.
And yet, that anonymity comes at a cost. What if you don’t find your people? What if you do find your people, but they move away to have gardens and babies? What if you remain alone? The result can be feeling adrift, removed from your surroundings, as if you will disappear if any further moments pass if you remain unperceived and unknown.
Never has a film captured that profound feeling, the bittersweet blankness, as well as this film. All Of Us Stranger shows the deep, entrenching and evasive ache of loneliness that can arrive when living in a city – when it’s so pervasive it feels like it’s entered your bones and will never come out.
That’s what life is like for Adam (Andrew Scott), a screenwriter who barely leaves the flat in which he lives alone that belongs to a skyscraper with barely any residents. His parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) died when he was young and his friends became his family – until they moved away when they started their own families. His life has shrunken to a cycle of writing and procrastinating and watching repeats of Top Of The Pops – although a fledging relationship with Harry (Paul Mescal) brings change to routine. Having decided to write about his parents death, he decides to visit his childhood home – only to be greeted by his parents who appear to be living exactly as they were on the day they died, 30 years ago.
I’ve not cried as much at a film as I did with this one. It’s such a tender and carefully told tale of loneliness, of love and loss and longing. Moving at a carefully considered pace, it peels back Adam’s layers in the same way he is opening up to Harry – allowing himself, and in turn us, to become vulnerable after years of stoicism. The dialogue is effortlessly profound, potent and moving – often through what is not said rather than what is. The performances from all four of the central cast are exquisite, but this really is Scott’s film. Rarely, if at all, off the screen his face is a wonder as it expresses such depth of meaning – every single micro expression is utilised with purpose. The aches within him reverb through him and off the screen, to the extent that the three songs it features will forever be synonymous with his performance. The joy of Alison Moyet’s ‘Is This Love?’, the yearning of Pet Shop Boy’s cover of ‘Always On My Mind’ and the recurring motif of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Power of Love’. A Holy Trinity of 80s melancholy.
[5/5 stars]
All Of Us Strangers is in UK cinemas from January 26th 2024.
Charlotte Sometimes 
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