So … did you cry? All of Us Strangers has finally been released in the UK after leaving cinemagoers in the US, and at various film festivals, in floods. It’s won seven gongs at the British Independent Film awards and is up for six Baftas, but no Oscars – whatever. For me, the film’s achievement is the way it’s managed to talk about love, grief and loneliness in such a powerful and original way. I first saw it at the end of September when it hit me like a ton of bricks, and I can honestly say that I’ve thought about it every single day since.
When I interviewed writer-director Andrew Haigh before Christmas, he told me that while he had designed the film to be increasingly dreamlike as it went on, the plot underneath was logical. Nonetheless, he said that he was open to other interpretations. So let’s dig into them, shall we?
When did Harry die?
At the end of All of Us Strangers, Adam (Andrew Scott) returns to his flat after meeting the ghosts of his parents for the final time. He goes to Harry (Paul Mescal)’s apartment, which he’s never entered before, and is knocked back by the smell of a decomposing body. Then Harry’s ghost appears, holding the empty bottle of whisky he was drinking when he came to Adam’s door looking for late night company at the start of the film.
It seems reasonable to assume that after being rejected by Adam, Harry went back to his flat, finished the whisky, took ketamine (Adam finds a baggie) and died of a drug and alcohol overdose, meaning that as well as reuniting with his parents who are ghosts, Adam has been having a love affair with one too.
So, about those sex scenes …
Adam is only able to let his guard down enough start his relationship with Harry once he confronts his past and meets the ghosts of his parents – after he’s first come back from Croydon, he gets together with Harry after their discussion about the terms “gay” and “queer”.
After Adam has come out to his mum (Claire Foy) back in Croydon, he has sex for the second time with Harry, who has encouraged him to take a bath because he’s feverish. It’s never made explicit in the film, but Haigh told me that Adam starts to feel unwell after his mum mentions Aids, and in the bath he tells Harry (who has no such hangups) that for years he had been too frightened of the disease to have sex with anyone. Later on in the film, as Adam runs through the tube train tunnels looking for Harry, there are old public information posters about Aids on the walls. In order to break out of his repression and fall in love, Adam has to lay to rest his terror of catching HIV.
What happens in the club?
Shot in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in London, one of Haigh’s old haunts, this is the only big musical moment that isn’t set to an 80s hit – the soundtrack to Adam’s ketamine trip is Blur’s woozy Death of a Party, from 1997. Haigh told me that there’s a subplot buried within All of Us Strangers in which Adam manages to break out of his loneliness and live as a happily out gay man – so perhaps this is the way he would have gone out partying in his early 20s, in the 90s. While he’s high, Adam imagines himself and Harry having the long-term relationship he has yearned for – though sadly it doesn’t seem to last, with Harry gliding past him in the club after locking eyes with someone else, before Adam wakes up screaming.
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What’s going on in the diner?
All of Us Strangers takes place in a mysteriously unpopulated world – a metaphor for Adam’s isolation. He and Harry appear to be the sole residents of their tower block, and Adam and his parents are the only guests in the diner where they have their last encounter, a childhood outing Adam never got to experience. The only other person is the waitress: presumably she can’t see Adam’s mum and dad, since she wonders whether he’ll be able to finish the family meal he’s just ordered.
Adam’s mum asks him whether she and Adam’s dad died quickly after their car crash – he tells her that they did, even though we know that his mum took days to die, a white lie that I felt was Adam kindly parenting his parents, shielding them from harsh truths they didn’t need to know in a moment of mature understanding.
The line that really got to me, though, was the part when Adam’s dad (Jamie Bell) tells him that he’s proud of him, and when Adam asks why, given that he hasn’t done anything, his dad replies, “Well you’ve survived. It can’t have been easy.” Finally, his parents recognise his sadness and pain, and the effort it’s cost him to keep going, even if he doesn’t have a wife, kids, a successful career or any of the other trappings of heterosexual manhood to show for it.
And what the hell is the ending about?
In the last scene of All of Us Strangers, Adam and Harry cuddle up together on a bed. Harry asks Adam to put on a record, and without him doing so, The Power of Love by Frankie Goes to Hollywood comes on – Adam was watching an old Top of the Pops performance of it from 1984 when Harry came knocking at the beginning of the film. The song contains the deeply romantic declaration “I’ll protect you from the Hooded Claw / Keep the vampires from your door”; in a (to him, unconscious) allusion to the lyrics, Harry had told Adam, as the older man turned him away, “there’s vampires outside my door”.
Now Adam and Harry can truly love, console, protect and care for each other, but it’s a brutally bittersweet image as it’s happening in some kind of supernatural realm, not real life. As the camera gets further and further away from the spooning lovers, it depicts them as one of a constellation of stars in a night sky, perhaps the other lonely strangers of the film’s title.
So is Adam also dead? I don’t think Haigh means us to think that he is. I think the image says that love is strong enough to smash the boundary between life and death, and that it’s our only defence against the infinite darkness that surrounds us, something Adam has come to understand after spending a lifetime running away from his own desperate need for human connection. Now, I think I may have something in my eye …
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