All of Us Strangers

Given I’ve been looking forward to watching this for ages, love the leads and it had very good reviews, a little bit disappointed overall, but I did still like it. One of my main issues was the messages felt very on the nose and were presented so directly that it was a bit uninteresting. His parents reaction to finding out he was gay was told purely in their words, and I didn’t gain much insight into his experience through this - a lot of the interactions with his parents felt too straight forward to me. For example, when his mum is singing lyrics to him that relate to their relationship and her feelings and regrets about it, I felt little emotion because it’s being fed to you in such a direct way. Petite Maman, I feel, achieves a similar concept in a far more emotive and intelligent way, in an even shorter run time. 

Despite these disappointments, there was plenty I liked as well. The atmosphere of the film definitely encapsulates Adam’s experience and it was immersive to me - you do get transported to this almost dystopian world, reflecting his loneliness. Seeing him go through some of his childhood anxieties in an adult body and still grappling with them worked well, and probably resonated with me the most of anything in the film. The idea that time doesn’t always completely heal everything is something that doesn’t often get put forward as an idea I think, perhaps because it’s important for everyone to hear that time helps when at the start of a difficult or traumatic experience, but the acknowledgment that you can still feel very similar thoughts and anxieties about something even decades later (especially when those things haven’t been dealt with) is also a valuable message that can allow acceptance of this, and hopefully in turn overdue healing. Also, his loneliness and loss of drive leading to inaction, in favour of imagining a world where he does take action and benefits from it is painfully sincere. The choice to not destroy the potential hope or thought of something, and by doing so, accepting that this hope will never become reality is something that makes no logical sense but something that is so easily done. 

Overall it was definitely thought provoking for me, I was just disappointed not to feel more emotion. Like, the idea of imagining telling your dead parents about a relationship with someone who you actually only met once and is now also dead is gut wrenching in hindsight, but at the time of watching I didn’t feel that strongly. I put this mainly down to the writing I think cause I thought the performances of Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal were as good as I was hoping and expecting (I hope Paul Mescal is cast as an Irish person again in the next thing I see him in though (not because his accent was bad)). I think the film maybe focuses too much on creating this uneasy atmosphere and sense of confusion for Adam, that it fails to build the emotion to a peak and you’re left with a dim sadness but no real explosion or release of this at any point. I do also think I may appreciate this more when I’m older, or even just on a rewatch.