Living in another world: "All of Us Strangers"

All of Us Strangers is both an adaptation and an intensely personal work. Returning home from the States after the cancellation of his HBO series Looking and the commercial failure of his racehorse drama Lean on Pete, the British writer-director Andrew Haigh has picked up a book - Taichi Yamada's 1987 novel Strangers - which centres on an immediately recognisable figure. Adam (Andrew Scott) is a sensitive fortysomething creative joined in the wake of bruising life experience, trying to tap out a screenplay in the mostly empty block of newbuild flats he now calls home, but most commonly observed distracting himself with reality television, junk food and long sessions of yawning while staring out the window. (Many freelancers will relate.) A sadsack recluse with the kind of troubled soul Scott is well placed to wordlessly conjure up, Adam is nevertheless presented with potential respite when a knock at the door reveals a boozy, garrulous musician (Normal Paul Mescal, with duff Northern accent) offering to invite himself in "if not for a drink, then for anything else you might want". Hardened Mescalites may well be amazed when Adam turns down this open goal - maybe the accent was a dealbreaker - but that's partly because he has another man in his life (Jamie Bell, with Seventies 'tache), whom he follows back to the wilds of South London, and some version of the family home he's hitherto been struggling to write about. Clearly, All of Us Strangers - presently a leftfield contender in the 2023-24 awards race - means to be puzzled over; clearly, boundaries both personal and temporal are being crossed in pursuit of the myriad delicacies, ambiguities and complexities of human contact. The question Haigh sets us to pondering, and may leave some viewers shouting at the screen, is a common one: what's going on?

Well, for starters: it's clear from the first words Adam sets down on the page that All of Us Strangers was Andrew Haigh's lockdown project, laboured over during those many long days when all of us had to be Adam-like shut-ins, company was largely limited to the ghosts in one's own head, nothing was certain, and everybody retreated in some way. This is the story of a writer who retreats down memory lane only to find himself stuck at an impasse or in limbo; whether or not this was Haigh's aim, his film brushes up against the ways memory and chronology got scattered by the pandemic. Hence the out-of-time Eighties soundtrack (Frankie, Pet Shop Boys) and AIDS allusions (another virus, different era); hence the repeated close-ups of photographs being shuffled, a visual analogue for editor Jonathan Alberts' dextrous cutting technique. Hence, too, the befuddling matter of casting actors visibly younger than Scott (Bell and Claire Foy) as Adam's mum and dad, and why these characters don't appear to have retained any information about their lad. Here, Haigh seems to be pushing beyond the rational to instead evoke certain states of mind: how discombobulating it is when people seem to grow up so fast, how heartbreaking it is that some scarcely get to grow up at all. The glowing reviews from damp-eyed first responders would indicate many folks out there are presently working through these issues - and that, as with 2022's Aftersun, a small film has become a charged lightning rod for those emotions we simply weren't allowed time to process in the hustle to get everything back to a pre-pandemic normal.

No issue there; that kind of emotional surrogacy is a service art has always usefully provided. My feeling remains that All of Us Strangers needs these extenuating circumstances, however, because on a scene-by-scene basis, it's wobbly storytelling to say the least, the kind of overambitious fumble-slash-muddle prodigious debutants sometimes turn in. Haigh's breakthrough feature, 2011's Weekend, was defined by its spontaneity: for long stretches, you felt you were watching events play out in some approximation of real time. Very little about the new film is real - unreal is the goal for much of it - and from the outset, a lot more appears frankly forced. Like his characters with those photographs, Haigh is turning over deeply personal material - what it was to grow up gay in the 1980s, what it is to be gay now, what it is to be a concerned parent and a loving child - and yet he's found such an odd and defensive means of bringing it to the screen; the genre-adjacent framing suggests a talent having needlessly severe doubts about his own capabilities, as if the fine line separating Adam from Andrew was erased altogether at a certain point in production. I was reminded of Haigh's near-contemporary Joanna Hogg, who took a quantum leap forward after she came out from behind the cover of her own characters, and - with the Souvenir films - began to frame her story as straightforward cine-memoir. Perhaps Haigh felt he owed Yamada (who died in November) a narrative debt, having riffed on his evocative title, but stuffing personal material into this flimsy supernatural framework muffles it; for much of the running time, I sat not blubbing, but wondering whether Haigh had decided to rebrand himself as M. Night Shyamalan now his stock has dipped.

The really strange thing is that, even amid a malfunctioning machine like this, Haigh's abundant gift with actors remains visible - it's just he's having to use them to conceal the peculiar mechanics of this plot in a thin skin of emotional credibility. Every now and again, an interaction approaches Weekend-like levels of honesty and intimacy; he's still good on ambience, those scenes that dim the lights and crank up the music, both to cover any clanks and to help persuade us these characters are the only people in the world who matter. (Another reason for the five-star readings: people really, really love these songs. But they're doing a lot of heavy lifting in this context.) Yet if you've clocked the framing, then any tenderness these sequences express can only be interpreted as tenuous, because we're pretty sure at least one of these characters doesn't exist on the same plane as the others. It is my least favourite kind of film, all told - the withholder, a work that keeps us waiting for the revelation of how all these strangers truly relate - and I'm still not sure whether we need to blame the Shyamalan of The Sixth Sense or the Alejandro González Iñárritu of Babel for its enduring popularity among cineastes. Either way, it's hard to snuggle up to a film, let alone embrace it, when it presents as so overthought and overwrought, and when a rug of some variety is so obviously going to be pulled from beneath our feet. Yet until it is, none of these interactions make complete sense - much as very little about the movies nowadays makes complete sense. It's strange to witness a boom in queer-themed cinema at a time when two of our foremost queer filmmakers (Haigh and Ira Sachs) should appear so creatively lost. But then, as All of Us Strangers - not a disaster, but a misfire - still seems on some level to intuit, it is a very strange time to be alive.

All of Us Strangers opens in selected cinemas from Friday.