All Of Us Strangers (2023)
Ripped my heart out and threw it onto a broken table.
Director Andrew Haigh’s fifth cinematic offering has long been on my “can’t wait to watch” list and so I knew what to expect last evening as I turned out the lights, made not a single note in my trusty journal and as the sub-title of this article makes rather plain, I had my heart ripped out and thrown onto an already broken table. Something happens on 50 minutes that broke me. Ten minutes later another *something* happens that is so incredibly beautifully innocent yet it ripped me into pieces and quite frankly by the ending credits and the first strains of “The Power of Love” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, I was an inconsolable mess.
Blimey.
I was expecting the love affair and the quirky innocence (I may not have made any notes last evening but the theme of innocence and being innocent kept running through my mind) and of a “Back to the Future” style time shift, but I saw echoes of Duncan Jones’ “Source Code”, a brilliantly off-putting fragment from David Fincher’s “Fight Club” and more than a ghost like presence from M Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” too. Spoilers prevent my fuller explanation but another sheer beauty of this film is the many tangential webs you can weave as you interpret the tale being told, the memories it jogs, the smiles it induces, the remembrance of a death of a loved one, those last conversations never had, the desperate desire and longing to be with someone, if only for one, final time.
Blimey.
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I was also expecting the every day ordinariness of a shattered ghost like figure of a man entering a realm of other ghosts after catching the Duncan Jones/Robert Zemeckis train ride back in time. But then another *something* happens and you really have to pull yourself together now as the film still has 20 minutes to go before “The Power of Love” and if you’re not in pieces by now you will be come the film’s inversion, note not a reveal but an inversion: of a broken man seeking peace bestowing that very human desire upon the ghosts of a past, present, and a back to the future.
I just wasn’t expecting this beautiful ghost story to hit home as hard as it did.
“All Of Us Strangers” is open to many and varied interpretations and what a wonder that is in this, the maddest and blandest of all possible worlds. 6 credited roles but 4 sublime star turns from Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, two lovers in the honeymoon of the love of their lifetimes and two deceased parents, ghosts of the 1980’s a 12 year old boy simply can’t be without. Sexual awakening, spirit of adventure, innocence, loss, grief and moving on from the ghosts of the past, all accompanied by a magical score from Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch and a greatest hits package from 1980’s heaven including Blur, Pet Shop Boys and Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
The film broke me on 50 minutes and way before “can’t you stay a little longer Dad?” and I thought constantly of the smiles of my dear old Mum and the beautiful daughter she and my Dad adored.
“Ripped my heart out and threw it onto a broken table”
I like that tagline!
You think they’ll put it on the promotional posters?