PremiumAll Of Us Strangers & The Main Character Energy Of Grief
Watching Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is like being simultaneously haunted, sad, dead and alive, writes Rahul Desai
Last Updated: 11.44 PM, Apr 28, 2024
This is 'Viewing Room', a column by OTTplay's critic Rahul Desai, on the intersections of pop culture and life. Here: All Of Us Strangers.
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A BROODING SCREENWRITER named Adam (Andrew Scott) comes out of his shell and starts to date his neighbour Harry (Paul Mescal). This passionate relationship empowers Adam. It inspires him to not only write his new script but also reconnect with his distant parents. Adam begins to visit them every weekend. They make up for lost time. He fills them in on all the details of his life: that he’s gay; he works in television; he’s secluded; he misses them; he might be seeing someone. Adam has deep and poignant conversations with his mother; she asks him about his sexuality, and her love transcends her small-mindedness. Adam has difficult and honest conversations with his father; the man apologises for ignoring a young Adam’s muffled pursuit of identity, and for subjecting him to his binary ideas of masculinity.
There is catharsis. There is healing. There is romance. And there is crippling heartache. Watching Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is like being simultaneously haunted, sad, dead and alive. It’s like listening to Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight, touching a trauma dream, tasting a childhood dish, smelling an expired memory and seeing Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun on loop at once. There is no sensory reprieve. It’s the kind of film that expands your understanding of pain while challenging the capacity to feel it. Most of all, it uses the language of escape to scrutinise the broken syllables of reckoning. In doing so, All of Us Strangers reclaims the humanity of feeling from the genres that romanticise it.
The story, like life itself, resists the tropes of storytelling. Adam visits his childhood home. But his parents have been dead since he was 12; they haven’t grown older, he has. So it’s not a coming-of-age story, it’s a grief story. Adam’s dad (Jamie Bell) and mum (Claire Foy) were killed in an accident all those years ago. His entire existence since — isolation; lack of intimacy; the fiction he writes; the silence he sinks in — is a consequence of unresolved trauma. Even his empty tower block in an otherwise-bustling city of London is a physical metaphor for his condition. And contrary to popular perception, the parents haven’t been looking over him either. When he sees his vintage visions of them, they are clueless about his life after the accident.
The arrival of Harry allows Adam to rationalise the void as a symptom of estrangement; he catches up with his parents the way a son might after decades of being disowned. The mother feels terrible for leaving him alone with his grandmother; the father feels sorry for being unable to distinguish his apathy from his absence. The physical oddities aside — they’re all the same age now — Adam’s mental picture extends the contours of an incomplete bond. He imagines their exchanges not as some utopian solution, but as an awkward generational summit. They’re familiar strangers to each other, jostling with their differences in sensibilities and cultures. In a way, it becomes a time-travel story that forsakes narrative gimmickry in favour of emotional agency. Adam can’t stop the accident; he can’t change who they were or who he became. He can’t alter the past and the future. But he can construct a bridge between them. And, being a writer who builds and rebuilds, he can cross that bridge at will.
That’s the thing about losing a loved one before their time. Time itself becomes the canvas that invites the colours of longing; it can be bent and doodled and painted on to devise an unfinished alliance. After my best friend passed away last year, my biggest fear has been the growing distance between us. I’ve been afraid of forgetting; of succumbing to the linearity of life; of getting older; of not knowing him further. My dreams — and nightmares — often feature us in an alternate reality, a last-ditch renovation of our shared history. I either see him in the past with a conscious awareness that he’s no longer around, or in a future that never happened. One day he’s planning his own funeral in front of me, the next he’s planning a marriage proposal to a faceless lover. It’s why the lingering sadness of All of Us Strangers feels so startling. It unfolds as a reminder that grief is the ghost of love.
We won’t age together; I can only visit the person he was. It’ll be an exaggerated version of our video calls across continents — annual catch-up sessions, except I’ll be the only one with information to share. It’s not different from the messages I send his phone number every now and then. There is no response, but I try to keep him updated. I like to imagine him listening, curiously asking me questions, absorbing my evolving equation with the world. It’s sort of fitting that he will stay young and rooted in time, because nobody lived in a moment better than him. I can also ask him about the secrets (and friends) he never told me about; he can joke about my developing dad-bod. I can complete the conversations we never had; he can cringe at the essays I keep writing about him. I can tell him about my parents and his parents; he can ask about my travels without him. Perhaps these meetings involve a beer or three.
But All of Us Strangers isn’t just a grief story. It’s also the anti-idealisation of one. It’s a confession that grief is not a purgative journey so much as an expensive identity. It monopolises the mind, often existing at the cost of onwardness; it’s an addictive relationship that leaves little room for others. Adam doesn’t know who he is without it. At some point, his parents realise that he is so consumed by this bridge that he is neglecting its foundations. In his pursuit of yesterdays and refurbished todays, he is in danger of losing his tomorrows with Harry. So they take him to his favourite childhood restaurant and tell him that he can’t visit them anymore. This is their final meeting. It’s the only way to push him forward. It’s the only way he might learn to look ahead.
Their decision brings to mind the central conceit of Richard Curtis’ About Time — a romantic comedy in which a man who inherits the power to time-travel eventually chooses between having another child and visiting his dead father. Even a playful sci-fi device — he uses time-travel to shape his love story and design fate — stops at the intersection of letting go and moving on. The implication across both movies is that the two acts are synonymous to one another — until they’re not. The heart ultimately reaches a mutually exclusive point of friction. One cannot move on until one lets go; a software upgrade is unlikely until there’s enough memory space to replace older apps with newer ones. This is the most difficult truth about loss. The asymmetric desire to remember is not a limitless entity; it emerges as an opponent of the symmetric instinct to live. Grief requires so much courage and stamina that it borrows — and even robs — from other attachments.
I know that I spend days conceptualising experiences with my late friend. I visit him so much that I’m too sapped to make new friends. I’m afraid of investing elsewhere. Knowing him, he’d be the first to sense this and ‘ghost’ me so that I’m forced to move ahead. He’d notice that my hollowness takes a toll on my people. He’d notice that it turns my hope into delusion. He’d sit across the table at our favourite bar and tell me that I can’t see him anymore. And I’d tell a white lie to him about speaking at his funeral. I’d tell a white lie about being grateful for the friends I have (left). I’d tell a white lie about not resenting a future that made him stop our intermediate sessions. I’d tell a lie by bidding each other goodbye.
The enduring despair of All of Us Strangers is that it doesn’t end there. In fact, it doesn’t end at all. The climactic twist — that the Adam-Harry love story is actually a ghost story — is a devastating one. It reveals that Harry died the night Adam, a brooding neighbour, first rejected his advances. Harry was lonely and damaged, he wanted some company; he didn’t get it. His body lay undiscovered in his own apartment for weeks. The Harry that Adam ‘dates’ after that — the Harry that gives Adam the confidence to reconnect with his parents — is imaginary. There can be many interpretations of this twist: Is Adam dead, too? Are Harry and Adam the same person? Is anything real in Adam’s writerly and ketamine-fueled world? But all of these possibilities merely reduce All of Us Strangers to a sum of its shattered parts. The film isn’t about a revelation; it’s about the brutality of broad daylight.
The most plausible theory is the one we are conditioned to avoid: Grief is an altruistic emotion, but it’s a tragically selfish process. It isolates the victim from their surroundings, and blinds them to the joy as well as suffering around them. It’s the darkest manifestation of main character energy: Everyone else exists to serve the protagonist’s journey. Adam is so overcome by his own pain that he unwittingly steals the narrative spotlight from a stricken stranger in his own building. Because he’s a writer capable of wrestling and exploring his grief, the camera is attracted to him — and not the messier Harry, a man incapable of producing the same striking aesthetic of loneliness and distance.
Harry’s story is arguably bleaker — his parents are alive but oblivious to him, he has a drug problem, he has the most forlorn face, and he doesn’t have words to fall back on. Consequently, Harry becomes a tender ghost in Adam’s story, as though he were more visible in death than in life. It’s the only way he can be seen. Much like Adam, the film itself is too preoccupied to hear his cry for help. He tries — with an infinite mirror shot in the elevator, with his lilting voice. But it’s nothing compared to Adam’s artful afflictions. It’s almost like Harry doesn’t have the tools to warrant his own tragedy, so Adam’s arc becomes a smokescreen for his own fading. All of Us Strangers is essentially a cautionary tale about Harry — his unrequited romance, his unwatchable weakness, his translucent woes — told through the lens of Adam’s absolution.
It’s a moving representation of how even the ability to grieve is a privilege. Despite possessing the vision to cope, some grievers are more sightless than the rest. The signs are missed, the messages go unread. I know I’m one of them. It’s one thing to be kind to myself — to focus on my own mental health, to heal on my own terms, to cut off toxic influences, to protect the bonds that matter. But it’s another altogether to be heedless of the world around me. It’s another to reserve all that empathy only for my own rehabilitation. I have the tools to express myself, but in doing so, I may be hijacking the silences of those who cannot. I have the fortitude to treat my wound, but I might be appropriating the agency of those who do not. I get so caught up in the excavation of my grief — like now — that I miss the hints of other melancholies. I become colour-blind to other shades of blood.
I fail to detect the anxiety issues of a friend. I fail to acknowledge the depression of my father. I fail to perceive the ageing of my mother. I fail to see the alienation of a well-wisher who keeps reaching out to me. I fail to register the burden of companionship on my partner. I fail to note the marital battle of a childhood buddy. I fail to spot the sinking health of a relative. I fail to glimpse the crumbling facade of someone whose mother has cancer. I fail to respond to the caring email from a reader with his own demons. I fail to see others flailing and failing. In my head, their identity is limited to their compassion — their shapeless spirit — towards me in the last year. In my head, they don’t exist beyond their ‘scenes’ with me.
Ever since I met my mourning, I’ve been Adam — the first human-being — to their Harry, basking in the anonymity of their ancillary roles. Watching All of Us Strangers instilled in me the fear of disappearing into myself. It exposed the slow-burning horror of invisibilising others to stay afloat. And it conveyed that all of us are indeed strangers in the myopic halls of survival. Grief is the ghost of love, but this film suggests that the converse is just as normal. Once the loss sets in, love morphs into the mirage of grief. Belonging mutates into the hallucination of longing.