Flasz On Film

What is the purpose of a twist in a movie? 

Ok, rewind a second. Before I go any further and lose myself in a flow state that teleports me an hour into the future where I wake up with two thousand words having appeared with little to no input from my conscious self, let’s just say that what I think this whatever-you-might-call-this-review-adjacent-ramble is going to revolve around may be considered ruinous to at least a handful of plot machinations found in the narrative of All of Us Strangers by Andrew Haigh. Well, as much as you can call them “plot” machinations or maybe even refer to the movie as a narrative. It’s debatable. But – in lieu of a straight-up review – if you have not yet seen this movie, go and do so. Five stars. Have you seen the graphic up top? That’s right. The movie is great. Thumbs up. Go and watch it and then come back to read whatever comes after this sentence arrives at its inevitable conclusion, which may be never given the fact I am now acutely aware of its length and consciously extending its duration just to mess with you… fine, I’ll stop. There. Happy? 

Where was I? 

Ah, yes. Twists and stuff. What is the purpose of them and why is it pertinent to All of Us Strangers? Glad you asked. Well, in a conventional sense, a twist – also known as a plot twist, which makes what I am about to say even more blatantly revealing – is a device used by a storyteller to recontextualize the plot and, frequently, to force a new interpretation of events onto the narrative. Villains become heroes; heroes become villains. Rugs. Pulling. All that jazz.  

Now, when it comes to Andrew Haigh’s new film, my go-to blurb I wouldn’t mind seeing on a poster – even though it honestly ruins at least one element of the story – is that it functions like an arthouse rendition of The Sixth Sense, in that in contrast to a conventional movie where the plot serves to recontextualize the plot, All of Us Strangers uses a similar device to recontextualize its thematic interpretation… which may or may not happen long after the credits roll. Which makes the movie even more haunting. And quite a bit more depressing.  

I can’t be the only one who watched The Sixth Sense (though admittedly, it took me several sittings to arrive at this reading) and thought that the movie was an incredibly disturbing portrayal of parental neglect, because Cole (played by young Haley Joel Osment) was effectively left to his own devices with what could be seen from the outside as a spiralling mental illness. On the face of it, we see Bruce Willis come into his life as a therapist and we assume Cole’s mother was the one responsible for his emergence in the narrative. However, as the well-known twist implies – encapsulated in the “I see dead people” line followed by the camera cutting straight to Bruce Willis’ face – the therapist is a ghost. He doesn’t exist. And as we cheer and applaud M. Night Shyamalan’s authorial acumen, we all forget that Cole’s mother did sweet eff-ey to help her young son who insisted on seeing people who weren’t there and wore all the warning signs and red flags of schizophrenia. Cole’s mother just threw her hands in the air and did nothing.  

How is this relevant to All of Us Strangers? Here’s how.  

If you look at this movie superficially and engage with it directly, it presents itself as a portrait of a grieving man (Andrew Scott) working through his many unresolved traumas and attempting to find solace and warmth in the arms of a man he just met (Paul Mescal). But not everything is as it seems. Scott’s character Adam is frequently seen interacting with his parents (played here by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy), which immediately raises an eyebrow because they are not of the right age to be Adam’s parents. But that’s not the twist. Well, it is but it’s not relevant to the genius of this story, only to the simple fact it establishes an unreliable narrator and hence makes sure that whatever the narrative serves later does not come completely out of the blue. And even with that, it honestly doesn’t matter because the plot of All of Us Strangers is merely a spec in the tapestry of its ingenuity.  

What matters here is that this little narrative hook makes you, the viewer, invested in Adam’s ordeal. As you realize, with Adam’s help as he explains to Harry (Mescal’s character) how his parents died in a car crash when he was a young boy, that Adam’s parents are figments of his imagination, you begin to shift your perception of what the filmmaker is trying to achieve here. It’s not exactly a Kaufman-esque discovery but it sure resonates at sympathetic frequencies in how the narrative realigns your own perspective and forces you to interpret everything you see as though it wasn’t there to begin with. Connecting the dots and understanding the reason why the filmmakers chose to cast Claire Foy and Jamie Bell as Adam’s parents is the first step on your journey to realizing what Haigh’s movie is truly attempting to achieve.  

It is, we are led to believe, first and foremost a study of grief. A study of Adam’s longing for inner peace because he simply misses his parents and as such he has been robbed of crucial elements of his upbringing, such as the opportunity to come out to them and to assert his own sexuality. Therefore, he is forced to fantasize about having done just that. We see Adam as he visits his parents’ house and interacts with them. He sits down for a cup of tea with his mum. He levels with his dad. He sees how difficult it is for them to accept him and that they naturally do accept him anyway, because they love him above all else.  

However, that’s not what happens, is it? Adam never speaks to his parents because they are dead, and this is not The Sixth Sense. He isn’t seeing dead people. He might be working through those scenes in his head because he is a writer, so maybe he is writing a screenplay and what we see are scenes from a movie he is putting together as a way of coping with his internal pain. Perhaps it is his internal monologue we see visualized. We can never be really sure. In fact, we can never be really sure of anything in Haigh’s film because once you establish the narrator as unreliable, we can’t really trust him. We only know that what we see is what he feels.

But we do. We do because we want to empathize with Adam and sit on his shoulder as he slowly makes his way towards some kind of inner peace, be it in Harry’s warm embrace or elsewhere. Again, this isn’t what the filmmakers perhaps want us to leave with and instead they remind us that since Adam sees people that don’t exist and manufactures interactions to manifest his long-suppressed traumas, anxieties and depressive states, why should we trust anything we see? After all, as the movie progresses, Haigh keeps dropping visual hints by filling negative spaces with Adam’s mirror reflections, dropping frames here and there to suggest subliminally that Adam may be disconnected from the real world and then by investing with a full-on fever dream we can’t ever be certain if it’s real or not.  

Until we are allowed to find out the truth.  

And the truth is frightening. 

Eventually, we learn that Harry isn’t real either and that the only time we saw Adam interact with anyone but figments of his own imagination was when Harry knocked on Adam’s door in what seems to be a stirringly empty high-rise apartment building and when Adam decided against inviting Harry over for a drink. Maybe he was afraid that Harry was drunk, and he’d take advantage of him. Maybe he was simply anxious. We can never tell. But the truth is that Harry was just as lonely and anxious as Adam was and that he went back to his apartment and drank himself to death.  

Everything we interact with in All of Us Strangers is a mental projection, a fantasy, a figment born in a mind of someone who’s essentially retreated from the world into the inner universe of his own anxieties, where he lives his what-ifs as though they were real. But they’re not. He’s just there in his room, looking at the wall while old episodes of Top of the Pops are playing in the background.  

None of the beautifully touching romance between these two men ever takes place. Their encounters are imagined. Their love is manufactured. Their kinship is only wished for by a mind deprived of human interaction so profoundly that it refuses to even entertain the possibility of having one because it’s too anxiety-inducing. Thus, All of Us Strangers becomes not a love story, or a study on grief. Well, it is both of those things, still. However, it is above all a visualization of a death spiral in which Adam’s character is trapped. He’s not lonely. He’s alone. And the movie is a study on what it feels like to be alone.  On what it is like to be beyond help.

To this end, Haigh employs the final minutes of the film to truly bring this message to the viewer, perhaps even at the risk of them not fully understanding the extent of the tragedy they are shown until quite a bit later. The big twist of telling us that Harry isn’t real is not here to surprise because it’s a plot-busting revelation. It’s an emotionally crushing reveal that the filmmaker capitalizes on by showing Adam getting into bed and snuggling up close to Harry as Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “The Power of Love” overwhelms the speakers. The camera zooms out further and further, and eventually the image of Adam and Harry sharing their embrace coalesces into a shiny white dot. A star in the tapestry of the night sky – separated from other similar stars (presumably also standing in for another lonely soul) by millions of light years filled with nothingness.  

All of Us Strangers leaves us with a soul-rending message that some of us – people you may even know or recognize – are so profoundly alone that they exist in the universe all by themselves. They are so far away from other life forms that nothing but darkness fills their field of vision. They may sedate themselves with fantasies but it does not change the simple fact they are hurting, all alone… unable to make a connection.  

That’s what happens when an arthouse movie executes a twist because it is not the plot, but our entire interpretation of the human condition may end up unmoored and left adrift in the roiling ocean of uncertainty. All of Us Strangers promises us a supple drama about a man and his emotional turmoil but by way of pulling the rug from under our feet it forces us to not only experience this turmoil but to participate in it to the full extent. Its artistry is perfectly deployed in service of a haunting drama about humanity that eventually unravels and presents its true form as a horrifying nightmare of utmost intensity that could easily stand toe-to-toe with movies of Olivier Assayas or Pedro Almodovar. It’s an intricate and artfully accomplished piece of phantasmagoria you’d be hard pressed to find this side of Personal Shopper or Anomalisa.