All of Us Strangers (2023)

image courtesy of vulture.com

Grief has been the subject of countless films. So has guilt. So has the long, painful road toward recovery. The “ghost story as emotional reckoning” device is hardly new, and it won’t retire after this. But I want to be clear: I deeply respect what Andrew Haigh is attempting here, and the vision behind this is genuinely ambitious. It just doesn’t fully stick the landing for me. Adam (Andrew Scott) is a writer hollowed out by loss - his parents died when he was a child, and decades later, he remains emotionally paralyzed, “visiting” them (played with quiet tenderness by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) in ways that make forward motion feel nearly impossible. Scott is magnetic, carrying the film’s enormous weight with restraint and authenticity. When Adam meets his neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal), something stirs - a faint flicker of feeling somewhere north of pain - and for a while, the film finds a fragile, beautiful rhythm. But here’s my honest issue: the melancholy of this film eventually chokes out the emotional levity it seems to be reaching for. The film works so relentlessly to immerse us in Adam’s emptiness that it struggles to breathe, and by extension, so does the audience. Without venturing into spoiler territory, I’ll say the film’s concluding turn feels more artificial than earned - a choice that, in a story demanding full emotional surrender, keeps you at arm’s length precisely when it should be pulling you closest. Maybe being dragged this deep into the mud is the point. And I admire the intention behind that commitment. But admiring a film’s reach and being moved by it are two different things, and this film left me more exhausted than devastated.

3 out of 5 Stars