All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023)

Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott in All of Us Strangers

Cast: Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy. Screenplay: Andrew Haigh, based on a novel by Taichi Yamada. Cinematography: Jamie Ramsay. Production design: Sarah Finlay. Film editing: Jonathan Alberts. Music: Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch. 

Movies are not poems. Cinema is based on externalities, on the documentary impulse to record and preserve that which is happening outside of ourselves. Poetry is interior, a response to the impulse to record and preserve the emotional and intellectual experiences produced within us by the outside world. Making movies tends to be communal, writing poems to be private. And yet the two are always superimposing themselves on each other -- on the one hand we have poetry readings, and on the other the viewing of movies in our living rooms and bedrooms. And from the beginning, moviemakers have striven for the poetic, just as poets have always tried to record the seen and heard as pathways to the emotion and the idea. Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers is the product of the attempt to find something like an objective correlative for a variety of emotions -- loneliness, desire, regret -- and ideas -- the centrality of family relationships, the nature of sexuality, the persistence of the past. Haigh finds it in a ghost story, a well-worn trope for literature and film, and tantalizes us into questioning how much of the experience depicted in the film is external and how much is interior -- whether Adam (Andrew Scott) actually encounters the ghosts or is projecting his psychological disorder onto the world. One critic wrote that she approached the ending of the film hoping that we would find out that what we have been watching is actually a story Adam has written. But that would have been on the order of the banal "it was all a dream" conclusion that has been foisted on us too often. Haigh wisely leaves us with questions -- maybe too many for the film's own good. His aim is to unsettle us, in the way the loose ends of a poem, the lines and images that don't quite settle into explicit statements, linger with us. It helps that the movie is perfectly cast, with actors who can translate longing and loss into visible experience. If you've ever been cautioned about a movie to not take it too literally, this is one of those times.