All of Us Strangers

Originally published on 08/10/23 on Letterboxd

Quintessentially Andrew Haigh in the all-consuming sadness it mines in queerness as isolation, but it becomes all the more harrowing when the spectrality Haigh is so skilled at locating in everyday life takes on a more literal meaning. At various points throughout the film I was reminded of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s ghost stories Pulse and Retribution- stories where the prospect of being alone is a source of profound horror, and where the terror that drives Tokyo’s denizens insane stems less from the prospect of the undead than it does from the fact that they, too, will one day become the very spectres that haunt them.

Haigh’s film wrestles with a similar conceit, except it is less the loneliness to come than it is the loneliness that has always been, and comes with being queer, haunted by the loss of those with whom you were never able to reconcile and living in one of the loneliest places on the planet. Brought me to the verge of sobbing on numerous occasions, not least because of Andrew Scott’s character trying to come out to his mother as a grown man but being reduced to a little boy the minute he opens his mouth, and realising that this was never going to go the way he planned.
Much of this stems from how brutally raw Scott and Mescal are in this- the latter, in particular, capturing a certain all-too-familiar vacancy. Also one of the best films about how alienating London is as a graveyard of unfulfilled dreams. Blur needledrop absolutely wrecked me.