All of Us Strangers: Phantom Attachments

All of Us Strangers, like Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Anthony Minghella’s Truly Madly Deeply, is a ghost story in which the uncanny merges so fluidly with the everyday that one might easily forget it’s a fantasy at all. There is no horror here in the afterlife. Adam either sees dead people or imagines them so vividly into being that they become independent spiritual entities; either way, he accepts their presence without confusion or protest. Perhaps this sixth sense is a natural consequence of his own partial retreat from the land of the living. Deftly and inventively adapting Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, Haigh isn’t preoccupied with the rules and regulations of this strange dimension but rather with its emotional truths.

In this existential hinterland, ghosts can’t necessarily identify one another as such, while Adam can only really differentiate a member of the deceased if he recalls the death in question. Such is the case when, on a memory-stoking trip to Sanderstead, the very ordinary outer-London scene of his early childhood, he spots a man he recognizes, and follows him home. Leather-jacketed and neatly mustachioed, the man (Jamie Bell) is a little younger than Adam, and for a charged, uncertain moment, we think perhaps they’ve cruised each other. But it’s his father, fresh-faced and frozen at his age of death; back at the family home, his mother (Claire Foy) is likewise undead and well, still in her eighties perm and loose pastel sweats. They’re pleased but not overly surprised to see him, and the reunited trio settles comfortably into catching up.

That Adam has moved the dozen-plus miles from Sanderstead to Stratford—from London’s dowdy outskirts to one of its throbbing urban centers—is a point of pride to his working-class parents, who hail from the era when Margaret Thatcher demonized poverty, encouraging the hoi polloi to transcend their roots. Adam’s writing career may not have made him famous or glamorous, but it nonetheless strikes his parents as a step up from their ordinary, wage-earning lives: something to brag to the neighbors about.

His sexuality, revealed on a second encounter, is another matter. “They say it’s a very lonely kind of life,” says his rattled mother, echoing a line heard by many gay people in a period when the powers that be explicitly aimed to isolate them, no matter how much queer communities rallied against it. For his parents, locked forever in 1987, the reality of gay life is the one presented by the mainstream media, with panic-inducing headlines about the AIDS epidemic, and Thatcher’s openly homophobic government, then on the brink of bringing Section 28 into law and thereby banning the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities. Why wouldn’t Adam’s admission strike fear into his mother’s heart? Foy pitches her aggrieved tone perfectly, her voice terse and tightened, not merely with ingrained prejudice but also with a parent’s dismay at a child’s identity having formed outside her sphere of influence.

But the 2020s are a brave new world, Adam explains, even if he doesn’t quite share in it: to the question of being lonely, he responds, “If I am, it’s not because I’m gay, not really.” Like much of what he tells his parents, it’s a half-truth, meant to make his life sound fuller than it is. Adam can be more honest with Harry, after correcting his earlier error and inviting him inside. When they eventually fuck, in velvety half-light, Adam must remind himself to breathe. Because he came out and of age in a more paranoid time for gay men, erotic abandon doesn’t come easily to him.

Who will protect Adam, however, from a life lived among specters? In Scott’s devastating performance, the character’s initial, unreadable composure slowly crumbles: the more time he spends with his parents, the more he reverts to his preadolescent state, until, lying between them in patterned pajamas, he somehow becomes his middle-aged and eleven-year-old selves all at once. In bed, he cradles himself like a fragile boy; when his father says something he doesn’t want to hear, Adam shushes him with a child’s strident bossiness. His parents insist he must stop seeing them, that they must voluntarily close this afterlife portal. Returned to the reality of his hollow tower block, he has one ghost left to cling to. Back in his own adult bed, he holds Harry’s body close, expressing the same intense need with which he held his parents. Romantic and familial loves reflect one another throughout Haigh’s film, all filling the same void for our affection-starved hero.

And so All of Us Strangers ends in limbo, somewhere between life and death, reality and delusion, comfort and despair. Adam and Harry lie in an embrace so tight their spirits might merge, as the unmistakably sonorous vocal of Holly Johnson commands the viewer to “make love your goal.” Hitherto a master of very English understatement, Haigh has never previously flirted with this volume of sentiment or spirituality, but this ending is the right crescendo for a film about allowing oneself to feel. Much of the movie is shot in a dusky, smoke-blue afterlight, against which human flesh sometimes appears ablaze, like the brilliant last gasp of a scarlet sunset. Fittingly, in the closing frame, the men’s entwined bodies burn so brightly as to become a supernova in the night sky—or a single, hopeful light on in an otherwise dark high-rise.