Andrew Haigh | All of Us Strangers / 2023

ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Haigh (screenwriter, based on Strangers by Taichi Yamada, and director) All of Us Strangers / 2023

 

I loved Andrew Haigh’s first gay film, Weekend of 2011 and very much appreciated his next two movies, 45 Years (2015) and Lean on Pete (2017), neither of which were LBGBQ oriented; so I very much looked forward to seeing his 2023 movie, All of Us Strangers, which along with his TV series Looking, brought him back to gay themes.

     In this new film, two men alone seem to inhabited the towers of a new London high rise, a tower block—not so very different from the isolated world in which the hero of Weekend lived. But here, instead of regular tenants or even friends who might possibly surround him, the central figure, Adam (Andrew Scott) has no one to console him in his more than morose condition. He meets, quite by accident, the only other renter in the empty towers, Harry (Paul Mescal) who recognizes Adam as a possible sexual friend who approaches him, a bottle of tequila in hand, to suggest they might get together, if for no other reason than to escape the utter emptiness of the new apartment buildings and, metaphorically, of course, the emptiness of both of their lives.

 

    Adam, although clearly interested, basically shuts him out, preferring instead, at this strange juncture of his life—and it is clear is a juncture, a long-awaited moment in which he has suddenly discovered himself—wherein in this utter loneliness he is ready to confront his childhood and his painful past.

      Although viewers might immediately recognize Adam is making a big mistake, the movie moves on to focus on this handsome young man’s attempt—why at this moment is never explained—to delve into his deep childhood trauma which emanates from the fact that at twelve years of age he experienced the death of both of his parents in a car accident. His father died immediately. After his mother suffered a long dying, the child Adam was at the time was sent off to live with his aunt, not evidently a totally pleasant experience.

     Throughout most of this film, Adam imaginatively, so we presume, revisits his parents, now almost their own age, returning to a world of the 1970s and 1980s to his truly loving young folks who, at first, readily greet him back into their lives, happy to have him return and explain what has happened in since their deaths—perhaps to even explain their own deaths and possible suffering of which they have no knowledge.

       The parents, amazingly, are a lovely 1970s couple, open to his emotional needs, and as time progresses even able to assimilate his announcement of his gay sexuality, his mother primarily worried about the loneliness it might result in, Adam assuring her things have changed. His father basically able to accept it even apologizes for any bullying his son must have suffered through his friends and his own attitudes.

        What Adam, in his attempt to explain how things have changed, doesn’t reveal is that he is indeed very lonely. He has not assimilated fully to the contemporary gay world available to him, and he is totally caught up with a past that could never have been.

        The movie, meanwhile, proceeds as if he is living in the contemporary world, as he finally meets up with Harry, joining him at a gay bar where they share drugs before joining one another in bed and developing a relationship. That relationship, however, seems rather one-sided, with Harry providing the friendship while Adam continues in his visits of his childhood home where his parents still reside (actually the childhood home of director Haigh), and at one point a kind of breakdown, which Harry attempts to resolve.

          The visits into the past suggest something different: a man obsessed with his difficult past that doesn’t permit him escape from it. Even his parents—particularly when he crawls into bed with them, a full adult still attempting to resolve his suffering through their deaths—insist that it is time he leaves them, arguing that he should return to the “Harry” guy whom they, as ghosts, encounter when Adam attempts to take Harry on one of his returns “home”—this time Adam

discovering the doors locked, the windows frosted over. But even then Harry, his living spectre, seems to catch a glimpse of the past to which Adam is committed. And when Adam communicates for the last time with his ghostly parents, they admit to having seen Harry and insist that their son attend to him instead of themselves and the past.

 

         Even Adam’s subconscious, in short, tries to tell him that he must return to the living, finally ridding himself of his ghosts. But we already suspect that he cannot. And we gradually realize his numerous sexual encounters with Harry are also imaginary.

         When he finally does settle with his own past, and visits Harry at his apartment, the smell of death is overpowering. As Adam enters the room he discovers his “imaginary” lover dead, the bottle of Tequila he had in had on the first night, some weeks ago, still in hand.

          He is now confronted with a new ghost, who tells him that the night they first met he desperately needed a friend, Adam perhaps finally realizing that he has failed him in the present, busy as he was with his own past.

         But hardly a beat goes on before Adam embraces his dead love, taking him back to his own room to gently assure him he will now never be alone. Clearly, Adam is used to living with dead folks, able to embrace them in a love which he can never properly direct to anyone living. Indeed, by film’s end we have to wonder whether Adam is himself a ghost.

         Haigh’s emotionally powerful film ultimately is not about human beings expressing their deep feelings of love, but about the dead, and how the living imagine they might possibly have provided them what they were missing. I can hardly imagine any LGBTQ person not confronting a dead parent in their attempt to once more explain their lives, to help their parents, their loved

ones understand how they came to be who they are and to reassure them that their choices were not only the right ones but the only choices they could have made. But most of us know that is pointless, a fantasy we cannot fully embrace.

        It is difficult, accordingly, to watch a human being who encounters even a living human being desperately needing love whom he rejects because they were too busy focusing on an exculpatory world of the past. This is Narcissus, looking into the frozen rivers of ice, not a welcoming being who pretends to invite the lover into his dark bed. Ghosts are not a comfort for those who need love in order to survive.

       And in that sense, I was not comforted by the “strangers” of Haigh’s new movie. As film critic Donald Melville Wingrove commented, despite its excellent reception, “I was underwhelmed by this film”

 

Los Angeles, February 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).