All of Us Strangers (5/5 Stars)

Adam (played by Andrew Scott), a writer, sits alone in his apartment not writing. His building was recently built and so is almost uninhabited. One night the fire alarm goes off, Adam evacuates, and finds that he is the only person to do so. As he looks up at his building, he sees an apartment with a light on, the only apartment in the building with a light on, and a man looking down at him. They notice each other. Back in his apartment he hears a knock on his door. It is the man he had a moment with earlier (Paul Mescal). He introduces himself as Harry and offers his friendship in this lonely building, maybe more than that. Adam considers it but declines.

He thinks twice of it in the coming days and when he notices Harry again in the building lobby he strikes up another conversation. They start an intimate relationship. Around the same time, Adam visits his old neighborhood and indeed, the house he grew up in. He finds, without explanation, the ghosts of his deceased parents, frozen in age right before they died in a car crash when he was about nine years old.

What follows is a series of extraordinary conversations between Adam and his Mom (Claire Foy) and Dad (Jamie Bell). They are curious as to how his life turned out and how he is doing. Adam comes out as gay to his mother who is mainly worried, in a 1980s way, that such an identity would lead to stigma and illness. Adam explains that things are different nowadays. Then he has a conversation with his father who with bemusement explains that he already knew he was gay. That conversation turns when Adam questions his Dad as to why he didn’t comfort him when he was being teased at school because of it. After considering the matter in full, perhaps for the first time, his Dad apologizes in a moment of sublime warmth.

Adam’s interactions with his parents are not confrontational and his parents aren’t defensive. Instead, Adam is curious about why his parents did or did not do things and the explanations given, generally, are that his parents are human beings that sometimes make mistakes. Maybe if they lived long enough, they could have gotten it right eventually, but they died when Adam was still young. His parents are happy that Adam has found in his new relationship with Harry. The plot turns in a way that I won’t reveal when Adam attempts to introduce them to each other.

“All of Us Strangers” was adapted by writer/director Andrew Haigh (Lean on Pete) from a Japanese novel entitled Strangers by Taichi Yamada. Without reading the novel, you can feel the Nippon seeping through the screen. It makes a lot of sense that the original story is about a man in Tokyo feeling lonely. Meeting ghosts as a matter of course without the obligatory “this can’t be real” scene is very Japanese. But reading the synopsis of the novel’s plot one gets an idea of how great an adaptation this could be. (I won’t know for certain until I read the book, which is now on my list. Ask me in a couple of years about it.) Apparently the homosexual identity of Adam and the very personal conversations about sexuality with his 1980s parents were all superimposed by Andrew Haigh on a Japanese novel about ghosts.

Sometimes when the emotions of a story are so raw, it helps to have a creative barrier to better aid the audience to digest the story. Japanese movies in particular can be so intense that sometimes I feel the subtitles help the experience. After all, when you don’t understand the language, you kind of assume that the acting is perfect and don’t find it distracting. (It is hard to imagine Grave of the Fireflies, a movie about fire bombings and starvation, being endurable without the helpful emotional salves of a foreign language and anime.) It is then commendable that All of Us Strangers, a live action movie in English, hits all of its notes with appropriate delicacy. In particular, the performance of Andrew Scott is meticulous in its execution. This movie excels in the Japanese art of small things.

There is one very special moment in this movie that is a lock of my annual award of Best Use of a Song. One of the ghost encounters has Adam travel back in time to the night of his parents’ death as they set up a Christmas tree in the warmth of the family home. Playing on the radio is “Always On My Mind” by The Pet Shop Boys. This song, like the movie, is an exceptional cover that transforms a heavy handed lyrical ballad sung by the likes of Elvis Presley into a normal brit pop tune with 1980s synthesizers and beats that only upon further introspection reveals tender and moving lyrics. Movies, music, poetry, I mean art in general has a utility in our lives that this scene is a shining example of. For most of us, it is hard to articulate exactly how we feel, either by lack of talent or by lack of nerve and probably both. But sometimes you can just point to a song, a dialogue, a phrase, a picture and say this, this is how I feel. All of Us Strangers is one of the best movies of the year.