All of Us Strangers (now on Hulu), from director Andrew Haigh, sinks the viewer into an eerie, speculative world full of ghosts, grief, regrets, and a complicated relationship with the line between life and death as the backdrop of a love story. While the romance is gut-wrenching and the commentary on familial grief is strong, there’s a reason the top google suggestion about the movie is: “What actually happened in All of Us Strangers?” There is a deep inconsistency in the worldbuilding and a lack of honoring the “rules” that are generally established within most fantasy worlds that leaves viewers utterly confused by the end.
All of Us Strangers gets many of the contours of its paranormal influenced, slightly off balanced setting and some of its major plot beats from the 1987 novel, translated from Japanese, Strangers, by Taichi Yamada. While there are significant details changed—like replacing the book’s Kei, the woman that the main character, Hideo, falls for after his divorce, with Paul Mescal’s Harry—most of the film’s worldbuilding and skeleton is lifted from the novel. Haigh’s cherry-picking of the book might also explain some of the inconsistencies that have left viewers so confused. Many details from the book appear haphazardly applied to Haigh’s altered version of the novel decontextualized and adrift from their original intended plot functions.
Typically, in a fantasy world, even one closely resembling the modern day, there are certain rules that are established to allow the viewer to understand altered aspects, like how magic can be wielded. These rules give the viewer expectations and create the limitations the narrative has to work within. There is an unspoken contract with the viewer that these rules, once established, will be obeyed, and breaking them at the end to manufacture a finale typically leads to soured feelings on the entire project. All of Us Strangers, either intentionally or by accident, does not offer the viewer a coherent set of narrative promises, ends with a final reveal that should be utterly infuriating, and is incredibly difficult to decipher, even after multiple re-watches. Yet, I’d still recommend the movie to anyone.
From early on, its apparent that while resembling present day London, there’s something not entirely normal about the apartment block that Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Paul Mescal) reside in. While establishing Adam’s lonely existence as a single screenwriter living in a high rise, subsisting on gross, stale take-out, the fire alarm goes off. Adam exits the building without concern as he takes the elevator down. While he waits outside, he looks back at the building’s tower of darkened windows, seeing only one illuminated where Harry smirks down at him, clearly unconcerned by the regular false fire alarms. In later dialogue when Harry visits Adam’s door, drunk, knowing exactly where he lives despite the two not seeming to know one another, it’s confirmed that they are the only two residents of the massive apartment block.
The next morning, Adam sits down to start his screenplay about his family, describing the year and exterior shot that is mimicked when Adam heads back to his hometown. When he arrives, the house appears rundown and abandoned. While wandering through the nearby park, though, Adam encounters his father, looking exactly how he did before he died decades ago. When Adam returns home with his father (Jamie Bell), the house is restored to its former glory, and he is warmly received by his mother (Claire Foy).
They’re incredibly excited to catch up with Adam and learn about his life since they died in a tragic accident when he was a child. This establishes a direct relationship with the paranormal, though it’s unclear how Adam manages to cross the threshold into their world, whether he accesses it through a transformation on the train ride or by stepping into some cosmic ripple. Each time he returns to his apartment from a visit with his parents, his regular life appears unchanged. Even before probing the anomalies that arise around Harry, it’s clear that Adam has somehow accessed an altered state where he can interface with ghosts.
Spoilers Start
While it’s unclear where Adam exists on the spectrum of life and death, there are a number of theories that I’ve formulated about Adam’s state throughout the film. There are clues to support each theory, and there are also clues that directly contradict all of them. This is the problem with definitively untangling the threads of this movie. Does Adam simply start seeing dead people at a random point in his middle age, convenient for the movie to begin? Or is there something deeper allowing him access to his parents and also Harry—who is revealed to have died at some point in the movie, as Adam discovers his body during the twist ending. While much has been made of how long Harry was dead in the timeline of the film, the question of Adam’s status is, to my mind, the more essential one.
One theory, perhaps the flimsiest, is that Adam has simply written the events, as he’s seen progressively working on his screenplay throughout the film. He seems to be writing about his parents, and digging through his old family memory box triggers their first encounter, or, at least, his visit home. Perhaps he falls too deeply into his work and loses touch with reality.
While this doesn’t address Harry and their romance particularly well, there is an argument to be made that Adam created him too—or at least created their love story. Across the internet, it is widely agreed that Harry is alive when he first appears in Adam’s doorway, drunk, and is turned away. When Adam finds Harry dead the first time he visits Harry’s apartment, the bottle of whiskey Harry was holding that night is by his dead body, pointing to him having died that night. Perhaps, having regretted sending Harry away and deep in his loneliness, Adam writes himself a love story so compelling that he goes to find Harry by the end of the movie but discovers it’s too late.
Adam’s writer-brain is at least somewhat at play throughout the movie as a close watch reveals that the majority of the most tender scenes of Harry and Adam living in domestic bliss are actually drug-induced hallucinations sandwiched between their wild night out at the club. Even within this altered world, not everything that’s shown is a part of the canonical timeline.
The next theory is that Adam is experiencing the events of the movie as dreams or hallucinations from where he’s dying in the hospital. Throughout the film, the ghosts he’s surrounded by frequently reference Adam having a fever or seeming unwell. He frequently wakes up in a cold sweat. There are moments where it seems that the ghosts trigger his fevers, but he also hardly interacts with people who aren’t ghosts, so it’s difficult to decipher if the illness is induced by his interactions with the dead; though he does seem to deteriorate faster the more time he spends with his parents in their alternate world. These repeated fever references, that feel significant for how often they’re mentioned, don’t ultimately build towards any kind of definitive reveal.
These mentions of being unwell are likely a carry-over from the source material. In the novel, the main character is often told he looks gaunt or sickly but can’t recognize it in himself. This isn’t the theory that I find most compelling, though, because the illness as it’s portrayed in the movie seems like a dangling end that Haigh lifted for an unrealized purpose.
The final theory is that Adam is already dead. The empty apartment block represents a sort of purgatory. In scenes there, it is nearly always evening, and it’s eerily empty without a doorman or any other residents, which seems strange for densely populated London. The apartment building represents a liminal space, perhaps where his soul is waiting for resolution. To facilitate this, he’s allowed to visit his parents and gain a sense of closure for himself but also provide them with answers about their own deaths that have troubled them. Ghosts in All of Us Strangers are not omniscient.
He also falls in love with Harry, the other trapped soul waiting in apartment purgatory. Adam and Harry help one another work through lingering sadness around their own families and the course of their romantic lives. They have an instant, magnetic connection despite the generation gap that’s playfully exposed through the film’s well-crafted dialogue. Once they have offered one another what they needed, it is revealed to Adam what Harry has, at some point, learned about himself. Harry is dead, and in this theory, so is Adam. This would explain the general lack of shock Adam portrays after the initial confusion at the state of Harry’s apartment. Adam simply leads Harry’s ghost back up to his apartment to the bed where they shared so many happy moments; they hold each other as the bed dissolves into a supernova, implying that the two have finally passed on to heaven, or wherever next place is.
This is somewhat contradicted by their wild trip to the club; though, with Adam’s father in the early part of the film, it is established that these ghosts can interact with the outside world on rare occasions. If they are both ghosts, this night out makes more sense. The only other sticking point I find with this interpretation is that Adam feels held apart from the ghosts he builds his life with. From the fever references to the more grounded sense Scott offers his character in his portrayal, Adam stands apart. This can, however, be explained by Adam not being aware of his ghostly status until the end of the movie.
The charm of All of Us Strangers, and why it’s been nominated for BAFTAs, a Critics Choice Award, and a Golden Globe, among others, is that the love story transcends the strange inconsistencies of the world. Regardless of when Harry died or if Adam was ever alive, the two have an electric connection built through quiet, tender moments that mostly take place in Adam’s apartment, building physical and emotional intimacy within the limited scope.
I spend a lot of time writing about “no plot just vibes” literary books, and while All of Us Strangers offers a larger than life (and death) premise, it most cleanly fits this category. The movie deals with matters of grief, unrealized possibility, and reckoning with the unsaid as its primary concerns. Worldbuilding, in this case, is only the confusing set dressing that facilitates the unique conversations that everyone who’s lost someone close to them wishes they could have. Similarly, the romance is strong enough to yank on viewers’ heartstrings even if Adam and Harry don’t get to live out a happily ever after. In the end, they choose one another, and larger cosmic complications notwithstanding, that is enough.
All of Us Strangers is a success on the basis of the dialogue, the intimate moments, and the stunning performances given by Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy, and Jamie Bell. The film manages to find essential human truths that are undeniable through the inconsistencies of the alien world and offer an ultimate emotional payoff that circumvents storytelling technicalities.
