‘More than anything, I wanted you to leave the cinema and have the film continue on within you…’, says Andrew Haigh of his acclaimed new film All of Us Strangers.1 He achieves that, not least in the ambiguity of an ending which throws up so many questions and is open to at least two main interpretations.
But I’m not writing a plot-spoiling review. Instead, I’m wanting us to reflect on what his film says about the lives of many gay men in the UK today. Haigh is just a few years older than me and this film flits between memories of the mid-80s and contemporary Britain – the cultural changes of the last forty years highlighted by conversations his main character (Adam, played beautifully by Andrew Scott) has with his parents (still trapped in the 80s, for reasons the film explains).
In one conversation Adam comes out to his mum who, at first, struggles to even grasp what he is saying and then seems devastated by the news – ‘They say it’s a very lonely kind of life’ – and immediately worries about him catching AIDS. Her son tries to persuade her that everything has changed today, that same-sex marriage is now possible, but she looks unpersuaded, and the rest of film failed (deliberately?) to persuade me that loneliness isn’t still often at the heart of what it means to be gay today.
The other main character is a younger man, Harry (played by the ubiquitous Paul Mescal), who represents a later generation (queer not gay – for reasons that are helpfully explored) and would seem to demonstrate that it still is a very lonely kind of life – he movingly talks of being pushed to the edge of his family’s life because of his lack of children. These two gay men – one in their forties, the other in his twenties, are, apart from their apparent sexual connection (graphically portrayed), both still struggling (catastrophically in one case) with the long-term effects of loneliness. I guess that is why the film is called All of Us Strangers.
In a Guardian article, Alex Needham accurately writes that ‘…it’s a tender, aching expression of the insatiable human need for love and connection, which Haigh depicts as being so powerful that it can annihilate the border between life and death.’2 And watching it as a gay Christian man that’s what most struck me – how well it articulates that desire that we all share, and how poignantly it plays with the idea that there might be a love that is stronger than death.
And, of course, there is – Song of Songs 8:6 declares that ‘love is as strong as death’ and the death and resurrection of Jesus prove it. At the cross Jesus, in the loneliness he faced, meets us in the different forms of loneliness we all grapple with, and connects us with the only love that will ever satisfy us completely – His. None of us strangers – instead, all of us known, and loved, by Him.
- Alex Needham, ‘“A generation of queer people are grieving for the childhood they never had”: Andrew Haigh on All of Us Strangers’, The Guardian. Accessed 1 February 2024.
- Needham, ‘A generation of queer people’. Accessed 1 February 2024.
