All of Us Strangers: coming to terms with the grief and trauma of being gay in the 1980s
Cüneyt Çakırlar
Haigh’s ghostly, dream-like setting offers a powerful remedy for an ageing generation of gay men coming to terms with the grief that pervaded their young lives.
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The Conversation
Warning: this article contains spoilers.

A powerful film about intimacy, grief and gay identity, All of Us Strangers – featuring outstanding performances by Andrew Scott as Adam and Paul Mescal as Harry – can only be properly appreciated in the context in which it was produced.

In a recent article I co-authored with the film studies academic Gary Needham on post-millennial LGBTQ+ film-making in the UK, we argued that there is no collective movement or recognisable trend that can be called British queer cinema.

LGBTQ+ representations in British film-making manage to cross over different styles and genres. However, such wide visibility risks compromising the potential of LGBTQ+ films as a political force of collective dissent against homophobia and transphobia. In other words, mainstream representation may evade new agendas of LGBTQ+ activism.

Three areas have tended to dominate the past three decades of queer representation in British film.

1. Reclaiming LGBT heritage and history – including films such as Vita and Virginia (2018), The Favourite (2018), and Ammonite (2020).

2. Reinterpreting British cinema’s legacy of social realism and poetic realism – think of Weekend (2011), God’s Own Country (2017), and Pride (2014).

3. Making visible LGBTQ+ migrant identities, as seen in films such as My Brother the Devil (2012), Nina’s Heavenly Delights (2006), I Can’t Think Straight (2008), and Monsoon (2019).

Rather than leading to a politically and aesthetically distinct trend or wave, these films relay queerness in significantly different ways. Film historian Robin Griffiths argues that the “post-Thatcher” trajectory of British queer cinema is like “a journey without direction”, saying: “The struggles and oppressions that were so key to the radical currency of earlier iconic queer filmmakers such as Derek Jarman seemingly no longer hold the same social and political charge.”

For Griffiths, the “post-Jarman” British queer film demonstrates a shift towards a different set of aesthetic and political concerns, which were shaped by aspirations for inclusion and visibility. Griffiths also argues that this shift in LGBTQ+ culture is a departure from the radically political energy of Derek Jarman and his generation of activists.

Ghosts of the past

However, after I watched All of Us Strangers (2023), the trajectory of director Andrew Haigh’s work – from Greek Pete (2008) and Weekend (2011) to 45 Years (2015) and the HBO series Looking (2014-5) – started making more sense.

I came to realise that Haigh’s latest film is telling us a complex story of love, grief and attachment that is a product of the director’s evolving yet consistent commitment to a cinema of intimacy – a form of authorship that I have been struggling to locate in contemporary British LGBTQ+ film culture.

Most characters in Haigh’s films yearn for connection and intimacy and drift in and out of relationships. While the couples of Weekend (Glen and Russell) and 45 Years (Kate and Geoff) question their faith in and longing for monogamous coupledom, All of Us Strangers expands this question of intimate attachment to a new, piercingly existential level.

The film starts with Adam (Andrew Scott) working in his flat, located in a near-empty tower block in London. Harry (Paul Mescal), a mysterious neighbour, knocks on Adam’s door and starts flirting with him. As their relationship develops, Adam is preoccupied with the memories of his past.

He starts visiting his childhood home in Croydon, where he meets his dead parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) who, as apparitions, appear to be living there just as they were on the day they died in a car crash 30 years ago.

From a near-empty tower block to a suburban house of ghosts, the unpopulated cityscape in the film feels like a parallel, dream-like universe that we are invited to experience through Adam’s navigation of loss and grief.

Two cryptic conversations reveal the film’s deliberate ambiguity of where we are. “How do you cope?” Harry asks, meaning not only the quietness of the apartments they live in but also the lonely realm of alternative reality Adam’s mental state creates through grief.

In another conversation, when Adam reveals he lost his parents in a car crash and tells Harry he shouldn’t be sorry because it happened 30 years ago, Harry says: “I don’t think that really matters.” Grief is a life-long process: the resolution (or redemption) is not in moving on but in walking with and acknowledging its manifestations.

As a gay man in his late 40s, carrying the generational trauma of the HIV/AIDS crisis, Adam talks to the ghosts of his “younger” parents about his childhood and his sexuality. Avoiding confrontation, Adam’s conversations with them evoke a different kind of wisdom, that of a deeply reflective, other-worldly older self, which ends up feeling a form of forgiving compassion for the now younger vulnerable selves of his lost parents.

With this, Haigh’s universe of apparitions does not expose a trauma-induced nightmare but offers a powerful remedy for an ageing generation of gay men and their coming to terms with grief and trauma. Without grief resolved, there is no love. And without love, there is no grief resolved.

The powerful ending of the film makes us wonder if everybody in the story was a ghost, or if that matters at all. As Haigh also says, “in the end, it’s all about love”. Haigh’s account of love in the film transcends life and death. We are invited to embrace not a closure but a loving opening, through the acknowledgement of our ultimate orphanhood.

Distinctly more mature and relevant than Weekend’s formula of gay romance shaped around the monogamy v promiscuity divide, the depiction of love and grief in All of Us Strangers offers a beautiful response to contemporary queer culture and its crisis of intimacy.

I watched it with a friend who afterwards said something that really resonated with me: “It felt like one of the truest depictions of growing up gay in the 1980s and 1990s.”