Cambridge Film Festival 2023: Film #25
Less a portrait of one particular Londoner's grief and subsequent regression to childhood than an oblique and often challenging commentary on alienation in contemporary Britian and how it encourages, if not indulges, an instinctive nostalgia towards a misremembered past.
Some interesting critiques in The Guardian based around the question: What does All of Us Strangers say about being gay?
In typical Haigh fashion, these casual chats between loved ones are soulful. They’re also disappointingly simple. The film offers something of a “greatest hits” album of the coming-out canon, from the initial state of shock to the tentative acceptance to the earnestly vocalized regret over a lack of support. No amount of mysticism can make these touchstones feel new again. […] Whether it’s the fade-heavy editing style of Jonathan Alberts or the ethereal colours of Jamie D. Ramsay’s cinematography, All of Us Strangers always feels perched on the precipice of unlocking a deeper register. Yet Haigh remains content to linger in a purely therapeutic mode, offering counsel and comfort to Adam—and hopefully the audience by extension of their spectatorship.
— Marshall Shaffer (Slant)
It's dismaying to note that even now, the film might be 'too gay' for some. Haigh tells me that at a preview of the movie in Islington […] 15 people walked out at the sex scene between Adam and Harry. Parts of the multi-thousand-page market-feedback booklet that followed must have felt like a kick in the teeth: according to Haigh, "When you read the answers to questions, 'What is the reason you wouldn't recommend this film to a friend?', the biggest percentage said, 'The gay stuff.'"
— Arjun Sajip (Sight and Sound)
Synopsis: One night in his near-empty tower block in contemporary London, Adam has a chance encounter with mysterious neighbor Harry, which punctures the rhythm of his everyday life. As a relationship develops between them, Adam is preoccupied with memories of the past and finds himself drawn back to the suburban town where he grew up, and the childhood home where his parents appear to be living, just as they were on the day they died 30 years earlier.