"It doesn't take much to make you feel the way you felt back there again."
- "I've always felt alone."
All of Us Strangers is a 2023 film directed and written by Andrew Haigh (Weekend (2011), Lean on Pete). It is based on the novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada.
Adam (Andrew Scott) is a lonely writer in London who has never recovered from the deaths of his parents when he was twelve. After he meets, and falls in love with, Harry (Paul Mescal), Adam goes home to discover that his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) are still living and look exactly as they did over twenty years ago.
All of Us Strangers contains examples of:
- Adaptational Sexuality: The protagonist of Strangers is a divorced dad with a female love interest. That role has been Gender Flipped to create Harry, and both he and Adam are gay.
- Age-Gap Romance: Adam is roughly 20 years older than Harry. The two discuss their differing experiences growing up as gay men in two different eras.
- Ambiguous Ending: Some have theorized that Adam is dead in the ending and has joined Harry in the afterlife.
- An Aesop: As difficult as it is to move forward in life after the deaths of loved ones, it's painful but necessary to keep going and prioritize enjoying and experiencing life. Not only is it what our loved ones deeply want for us, but there are living people who need our help more than the dead do. Somewhat turned on its head when Adam decides to continue his relationship with Harry, a ghost, but it's nevertheless in a healthy effort to enjoy a personal relationship instead of keeping people away so that he can continue to cling to his grief.
- And Starring: Claire Foy gets the "and" credit and Jamie Bell gets the "with."
- Bittersweet Ending: Despite his desperation to keep their ghosts around, Adam has to say goodbye to his parents, who depart the earthly realm forever. He returns to Harry... who is revealed to have been long dead, but Adam comforts his ghost and continues his relationship with him.
- Blatant Lies: Adam claims that the deaths of his parents, while sad, happened a long time ago, so he's no longer emotionally affected by the deaths — as though he doesn't yearn to spend most of his free time in the company of their ghosts. An empathetic Harry immediately sees through this and assures him that it's not wrong to still feel wounded by the trauma.
- Dead All Along: Harry died on the same night he met Adam and has been a ghost the whole time.
- Dead Person Conversation: The entire film is Adam speaking to his deceased parents by visiting his childhood home, where they look exactly the same as when they'd died. This is also the case for every conversation he has with Harry after the first night, where he was alive.
- Death by Despair: A lonely, depressed Harry drank himself to death on the night Adam rejected him.
- Deceased Parents Are the Best: Adam's parents perished in a car crash during the holidays, which has left him lonely and depressed for most of his life, even if he doesn't admit it.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: Played with, since Adam's parents are essentially stuck in the 90s and find themselves shocked by his updates about what life in the 2020s is like. At learning that her son is gay, his mother tells him that it's a "lonely lifestyle," worries about AIDS, and can't believe that he can get married or have children.
- Gayngst: Played with. Adam and Harry discuss the fact that they've always been very lonely, but Adam says that while he was bullied for his "gayness", he believes he was always a melancholic person (and he carries a lot of sadness from his parents' deaths).
- Ghostly Goals: Adam's parents move on once they learn the circumstances of their death, and are assured by Adam that he knows they love him, and he loves them back.
- Ineffectual Loner: Both Adam and Harry are lonely people, and Adam in particular suffers because of his lack of connection to anyone but the ghost of his dead parents. In the end, they deliberately choose to leave the earthly realm so that he can move on with his life and stop living in the past.
- Jacob Marley Apparel: Adam's parents look exactly the same as they did in 1987 when they died.
- Magic Realism: Adam's parents come back to him after he meets Harry. There's no explanation for why, and even they aren't sure why they're staying, but Adam accepts and cherishes the opportunity to see them again.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The film leaves enough ambiguity that Adam's interactions with his parents and Harry could be supernatural, all in his head, or even a writing exercise for Adam's screenplay. The waitress can't see Adam's parents, a fact Adam seems aware of.
- Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Harry is an attractive, supportive partner who fights for Adam's attention and gets him to have an interest in life outside of revisiting his parents, without seeming to have any goals, job, or life outside of the apartment. Subverted by the ending — Harry is a ghost, explaining why he doesn't have much to do except hang around Adam, who can see ghosts. Furthermore, he's so eager to get Adam's attention because he was lonely and depressed in life, and asked him for drinks on the first night because he was desperate for companionship.
- Men Don't Cry: Adam's dad was a firm believer of this, which led to a painful memory where he heard Adam crying after being bullied, and failed to come in and comfort him. However, his father deeply regrets this and sheds tears of his own while apologizing.
- Minimalist Cast: There are a lot of extras in places like the club and the Tube, but there are only five speaking roles (Adam, Harry, Adam's parents, and a waitress that says one line to Adam in the diner).
- Most Writers Are Writers: Adam writes screenplays for a living.
- The Mourning After: A platonic variant. Despite his assertion to Harry that his parents' deaths don't bother him because it happened decades in the past, he clearly is traumatized by their death and has a very hard time moving on from them, to the point of begging them to stay when they consider leaving the earthly realm.
- No Name Given: Adam's parents are simply known as "Adam's mother" and "Adam's father."
- Our Ghosts Are Different: Adam's parents are completely friendly and loving. They don't always appear together for unexplained reasons, and their presence is a mystery to both them and their son. They're also well aware of the fact that they're ghosts, ask questions about Adam's life after their death, and even observe with amusement that Adam is older than they are at their death.
- Parents as People: Adam's mother has dated views on homosexuality, and Adam's father is aware of his conservative attitude towards masculinity and bullying. However, both apologize to him for their faults and deeply love him, which is reciprocated.
- Self-Deprecation: Adam informs his parents that's not a "real writer" but just a writer for film and TV. The trope also applies in a meta sense as the line was, of course, written by a screenwriter.
- Twisted Christmas: Adam's parents were killed in a car crash just before Christmas. As a result, he seems to associate them especially with Christmas; in several of his visits, they decorate the tree.
- Wham Shot: When Adam goes into Harry's bedroom, he sees Harry's lifeless body curled-up on the bed, with his decomposing arm in focus.
