The Media Tourist

Awards-buzz drama about connection, revisiting the past, loss and two men who find each other

All of Us Strangers
Starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy & Jamie Bell
Directed by Andrew Haigh
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Dec. 22

A struggling writer embarks on a fantastical journey back into his childhood in this gorgeously rendered existential meditation on loss, loneliness, memory and the power of love. All of Us Strangers is a wild ride full of feels in which past and present overlap and intertwine, time is fluid and fleeting, and Adam (Andrew Scott) gets to go home and visit again with his parents—who died in a car crash some 30 years ago, when he was just about turn 12.   

Is he hallucinating? Seeing ghosts? Did he fall into some kind of quantum-leap afterlife loop? How does his neighbor in his high-tech high-rise apartment complex, Harry (Paul Mescal), fit into things? There are more questions than easy answers in British director Andrew Haigh’s metaphysical, mind-bending adaptation of a 1980s Japanese novel with horror-story undertones.  

As Adam reconnects with his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, in smashingly good performances), he reenters a world that’s exactly how he remembers it, when he was a little boy. And mum and dad naturally want to know how he’s been, what’s he’s been doing, what kind of grownup he’s become. After all, they’ve been out of his life for a long time.  

So they’re not really prepared when Adam tells them he’s gay, in a relationship with Harry.  

That’s the crux of this improbable tale, as Adam’s gobs-smacked wonder becomes an emotional, heart-tugging reunion with parents who now realize they weren’t as supportive of their then-young son as they should have been, turning a blind eye to the bullying he endured and the loneliness he felt as a child. It’s left a hole in Adam’s heart.  

But as he’s nursing that deep wound, the void is being filled by his new relationship with Harry. They learn they share similar feelings of estrangement, as if being queer made them outcasts from their families, like strangers in their own homes. And two lonely people find each other in a world that can be indifferent or even hostile. Two lonely people who happen to be gay.

Scott, who played Professor Moriarty on TV’s Sherlock, and Mescal, who drew raves for his role last year in the acclaimed Afterlife, are both extremely committed to their characters in this exceptionally moving journey together, exploring a love and connection as vast and unknowable as the universe, as deep as infinity, yet as intimate and close and thrilling as the soft touch of bare skin. It’s a love powerful enough to transcend time and space.

And as Adam gets a rare, unbelievable opportunity to say a tearful goodbye that he never got the opportunity to say before, all that love becomes a cosmic thing, fuel for the universe, a glowing star in the thread of eternity.  

—Neil Pond