"All Of Us Strangers" written by Gregory Mann

"All Of Us Strangers"

One night in his near-empty tower block in contemporary London, Adam (Andrew Scott) has a chance encounter with a mysterious neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal), 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 before.

There’s a textured, indelible sense of pathos that runs through "All Of Us Strangers", and the vast majority of the film’s complexities sits firmly on the shoulders of the protagonist Adam. Adam is a forty-something gay screenwriter living in a new build apartment block in London. He’s an orphan. He’s single, lonely. He carries around the burden of grief from a traumatic episode in his youth that saw both parents killed in a car crash. A cliché, he claims. Adam is a very solitary figure. He’s described by his mother as a very gentle and compassionate person. But that’s a kind of privilege, in a way. Adam is yearning to see his parents again, aching to be known by them. Perhaps finding them again will bring comfort and closure after the terrible loss. But it’s no easy task, nostalgia can often hide a different truth, and his parents were a product of the time they lived. Adam must also confront his fragile sense of self, battered by growing up gay in the 80s and 90s. Two traumas perhaps, closely entwined, stopping him from finding peace. Harry lives in the same apartment block as Adam, and after propositioning his neighbor one drunken evening, the two eventually become romantically involved. Their intensely passionate and transformative love affair has a transcendent power for them both.

He feels like a little boy, like somebody who should be a lot happier than he is, and the world tells him that he should be, but he’s not. He hides behind being sex positive and sex forward, and being fun, and he has a somewhat casual but problematic relationship with drugs and alcohol, he’s trapped. We recognize him in little bits of outself and friends and young men in the world. Much of the film’s emotional punch comes from the tender, heart-wrenching, and healing bond between Adam and his parents, when he returns to his childhood home and spends time with them. His deceased parents, who are alive, and the same age they were when they died. It’s a unique and endearing sense of absurdity, yet one that almost instantly feels weird. Mum (Claire Foy) has a complicated role, she's less accepting of who Adam is, of who he’s become. You can imagine that the father (Jamie Bell) would be the one to be uncomfortable with the idea that his son is gay. It adds this layer of complexity to Mum’s character. Adam coming out to his parents, finally, is one of the key narrative forces within this tale, and is handled with an adept, delicate touch that makes for some of the film’s most moving sequences, down to the subtlety of the writing. The characters have to maintain a sort of element of mystery.

"All Of Us Strangers" is hauntingly poignant and hypnotic story of loss and love and everything in between, is inspired by the novel 'Strangers' by Japanese author Taichi Yamada. First penned in 1987 and translated into English in 2003. What if you met your parents again long after they were gone, only now they’re the same age as you? The romantic parallel journey of "All Of Us Strangers" takes place in a more familiar, contemporary London. Scenes there range from the towering, modern apartment block where both Adam and Harry live, to the nightclub, which hosts an impactful and beautifully rendered portion of the film, shot on location at the iconic queer London institution: the Vauxhall Tavern. The isolation of the former set where Adam lives adds not only to the themes of loneliness that are prevalent, but to an otherworldly feeling which plays up to the supernatural element of the story. It’s a key part of the story as it really symbolizes the character’s isolation, and feeling very disconnected from the world, so we all have a real vision in mind. It seems an emotional way to explore the nature of family. The film wants to explore the complexities of both familial and romantic love, but also the distinct experience of a specific generation of gay people growing up in the 80s.

Though "All Of Us Strangers" is set in a singular time frame and era, the sequences when Adam returns to his childhood home to see his parents take place in a 1980s version of our world, as though stepping into a dream, a hazy, nostalgia-induced memory. It’s kind of hallowed turf, in a way. Move away from the traditional ghost story of the novel and find something more psychological, almost metaphysical. It's very surreal, and it makes us think a lot about what our children are going to say about our homes in forty years. It almost feels apocalyptic. It mirrors the isolation of the world to a certain extent; you’ve got these corporate towers, and these cities that are rapidly eroding, and you feel like little ants in this massive tower.

If you’re not inclined to go out and mix with the world, you can very easily find a place that isolates you. That’s what the tower represents, it feels cold and soulless. And in the face of all that, these two characters still manage to find a connection which we think is really uplifting. The off-realism feeling, the ever-so-slightly otherworldly atmosphere, is something that's also informed by Francis Bacon exhibition in London and the paintings were really strong, timeless, and there’s something about floating in time and space, about a lot of those images which ties in really well with this script. It's also grounded by the way in which it tackles the human experience. Its many layers and textures carry a profound, emotional undercurrent.

The film feels quite like a dream, then like the moment just before you fall asleep or the moment you wake from a dream, not quite sure what’s real. A more liminal space. Rather than play up to the supernatural elements, the film wants to focus on the notion of memory and how it works. Memories define us; they define what we become, our character, both for good and bad. We dug deep into our memories of growing up. It's a painful but cathartic experiment. In many ways, the film is about how you integrate emotional pain into your life. That pain will never vanish, it will always find a hiding place, but that doesn’t mean you can’t move forward. We're just living in the moment. We are not considering that this has a finite time on it. We’re not considerate of the rules on what it means to be dead.

We don’t think we’re ever really discussing the logistics of what that means, necessarily, and that’s what we love about it. That’s something not just gay people experience, everybody wants to feel connected to their family. What would you want to tell your parents about your life if you could revisit them, or what would you tell them right now? We live in a world that feels impersonal, or cold. It’s harder and harder to find the connections that we see Adam and Harry have in the film. All of us have been children, and most will lose our parents. Many of us will be parents ourselves and have kids who will grow into adults in the blink of an eye. Many of us will find and lose and hopefully find love again, even if it doesn’t last an eternity.

Written by Gregory Mann