Content warnings: spoilers for All Of Us Strangers, mentions of suicide and mental health struggles
Last night, I watched All Of Us Strangers and today, I need somewhere to release all of the emotions it nearly choked me with. There is a chance that I’m not going to add anything new to the many discussions already surrounding this film, but I couldn’t let my experience of watching it pass without sharing at least a few words. It has been a long time since a film made me cry so much that I couldn’t speak, so let’s hope I have a better chance of writing my thoughts down.
To say I sat down to watch All Of Us Strangers unprepared would be an understatement. After a lovely day out, my fiancée and I simply wanted to finish off with a film we’d been wanting to watch for some time. From the very little I did know about All Of Us Strangers prior to watching it, I assumed there would be some angst and the potential for a couple of tears. I did not expect to be so personally confronted and touched by the film’s themes.
So much of the plot is left up for interpretation but the one thing all viewers can agree on is that it is about grief, loneliness and love; three things every single person on this Earth will experience in some capacity at some point. For Adam (Andrew Scott), his experience involves the death of his parents and the relationship he begins with his neighbour, Harry (Paul Mescal). While Adam is the character that anchors us to the film, all the characters in the story act as a representation of how these emotions can look so different and yet so similar.
Andrew Scott’s portrayal of Adam captures the years of damage unprocessed grief can cause, barely speaking or reacting – such as his mildly annoyed reaction to the fire alarm being triggered in his building – at the beginning of the film and slowly opening up to Harry (and us) as he takes that journey of healing. The subtle vulnerability portrayed by Andrew Scott reminds us that there is no expiration date on grief and the world moving on without you can cause debilitating loneliness.
The understated performance Paul Mescal gives as Harry is immensely moving, from the first moment he shows up outside Adam’s door to when Adam finds him in his own apartment at the end of the film. I cannot say I was particularly shocked to find out that Harry had died after that first encounter and that he either became a ghost or Adam invented a relationship with this stranger in his attempt to deal with the loss of his parents and all the emotions mixed up with that. It was not Harry’s death or even his heartbreaking question of, “How come no one found me?” that broke me. It was the final few minutes of the film as Adam soothes Harry (and arguably himself) back in his apartment.
In these last few minutes, as The Power of Love soars and the stars begin to shine, everything I had just spent the last hour and forty-five minutes watching hit me all at once. The kind of overwhelming, consuming loneliness felt by these two characters is something you can only truly understand once you have felt it yourself. Then you will understand how this feeling isolates us so completely from everyone else, enclosing us in crushing darkness it is impossible to believe anyone else is feeling. And, to me, that is the cruel beauty All Of Us Strangers embodies, the heartbreaking irony that something so painfully isolating is perhaps the one thing so many of us share. This confusing and impossible-to-explain emotion is masterfully portrayed in these final moments as Adam and Harry begin to fade and a sky of stars appears in their absence, stars that perhaps represent just how close we are to each other in our isolation.
It might be an odd comparison to some, but All Of Us Strangers fills me with the same heavy hope Bring Me The Horizon’s sTraNgeRs does, in particular the lyrics, “We’re just a room full of strangers/looking for something to save us/Alone together, we’re dying to live and we’re living to die.” Experiencing this song live, as everyone lights up the room with their phones, has the same effect as those shining stars that conclude All Of Us Strangers.
There is so much that can be said about this film, my words are from a single first-time watch and barely break the surface of everything that could be discovered on a rewatch. All I know is that, no matter how many times I do watch this film, that ending will no doubt hit me just as hard every time. My years of isolation may now be over, but I will never forget the nights I spent, believing how much better things would be if I just didn’t feel so alone.
By Skye Walshe-Winwood
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