All of Us Strangers is achingly sad, yet you emerge feeling generous

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All of Us Strangers is haunted. Not by ghosts, though a few characters in it aren’t alive. It’s haunted by all the things people should have said to one another before it became too late.

Directed and written by Andrew Haigh (45 Years), the film came out in England and the U.S. in December, where it’s left accolades, awards and wadded up tissues in its wake. It opened in select Canadian cities on Friday, but I wish it had arrived here before the holidays, because I swear that seeing it makes people want to be kinder to one another. It breaks your heart and then knits it back together, in a way that allows for more space.

Explaining the plot is tricky, but here are the basics: Adam (Andrew Scott, luminous), who’s writing a screenplay about the car accident that killed his parents when he was 12, lives in a chilly new tower block in London. One night Harry (Paul Mescal), one of Adam’s few neighbours, knocks on his door. At first Adam rejects Harry; he’s too preoccupied by past wounds to let anyone in. But when he travels back to his childhood home, his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) are somehow just … there, the same age they were when they died. As Adam reveals to them who he is, he’s also able to open up to Harry.

Review: Tearjerking romance All of Us Strangers is a ghost story half-full of tears

It’s achingly sad, yet you emerge feeling generous, because you have beheld the human condition: People are flawed; they fall short and fail; they don’t say what they mean not because they’re cruel, but because they can’t – because of some thing that happened to them when they were kids, which happened because some other thing happened long ago to their parents. But despite all that, it’s better when we try. Something shimmers in the trying – that’s where our humanity is.

“Andrew Haigh doesn’t let his characters be too articulate about their feelings,” Foy said in a video interview with Bell. “He understands how human beings actually interact – that they go around what they want to say. He likes to live in the ambiguity of that.”

Bell agrees: “Even in the scene where I say to Adam, ‘I knew you were having a difficult time and I didn’t comfort you’ – even in the moment where he’s trying to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ he’s still not getting it right. He’s still barbing him. Even when the intention is true and good, there are obstacles that keep us from saying the thing we actually mean.”

All good actors and writers strive to be honest, but All of Us Strangers succeeds because Haigh and his cast committed to an unshowy honesty. Haigh braided his life into the source novel by Taichi Yamada – he even shot the family scenes in his childhood home. Scott (Fleabag) poured himself into Adam, “and there was no part of me that didn’t want to give that,” he says in a joint video interview with Mescal. “The more I continue as an actor, the more I think acting isn’t about pretending to be someone else. It’s about playing with facets of your own personality: ‘Who would I be if I was this?’ I don’t want to act, I want to be.”

For Foy, “portraying feelings that other human beings have felt, you have a responsibility to be meticulous – to really examine yourself, question yourself, doubt yourself about what you’re doing: ‘Am I just enjoying having a bit of a cry here, or is this genuinely how people behave?’ If you get it right, people will think, ‘I recognize that. I know that.’”

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It’s a fascinating idea, an actor’s responsibility to the truth, and Mescal mentions it, too. In some ways, Harry is the embodiment of melancholy, of missed opportunity, and Mescal has played variations of that in other projects, including Aftersun and Normal People (for which he received Oscar and Emmy nominations, respectively). “I think melancholy is something I understand,” he says, “and I think if you understand something, and feel the capability to play it and do it justice, then it is your artistic responsibility to do that.”

Another aspect of Haigh’s honesty: Nothing is ever only one thing. Everyone experiences loneliness, and everyone intellectually understands that the way out of loneliness is by admitting you’re lonely. But that vulnerability is precisely what stops us. Telling our families who we are should be the easiest thing in the world – they love us, after all – yet it can feel the most impossible, even when we’re adults and know ourselves.

Scott understands that complexity innately – in fact, he named his production company Both/And. “Human beings, if we are feeling completely miserable, our intent is to disguise it,” he says. “When we get bad news about an illness, we say, ‘I’m glad we caught it early.’ On our wedding day, we could be thrilled, but also disappointed with the weather. That’s why human beings are kind of wonderful.”

Scott also “finds humor in places where other actors wouldn’t dream of finding it,” Mescal adds. “The scene where Adam explains the evening of his parents’ deaths – a lesser actor, even a brilliant actor, would deliver a version of that scene that is moving. But Andrew also found a childlike play, a 12-year-old’s grim humour, that if I had to do that scene, I would have missed entirely.”

All four actors knew the script was exceptional. “After the first few pages, I found myself reading in a kind of panic, hoping there was nothing in it that broke the spell,” Mescal says. They knew the shoot was working, too. After every scene, Scott would think, “That was incredibly special – upsetting, real, authentic.”

Now they’re absorbing the audience’s acutely intimate reactions, and their own. “I know it shifted something in me, but it will take a couple of years for me to tell you exactly what,” Mescal says. “It’s not our job as actors to be changed, though sometimes it’s an amazing byproduct. When that feeling pokes you, it’s too self-serving in the moment to be introspective about it. And I don’t think this film is self-serving in any way. It’s a generous film, an act of healing.”

“The idea is very simple,” Scott says. “Life ends. It ends, so seize it and say it and do it, because we’re not here long. Watching the film, though, is an enormously cathartic experience for people. Audiences really cry. That’s what the purpose of art is, to put out a hand and touch somebody else’s.”

“If I don’t emotionally connect with a film, I struggle to see the point of it,” Foy says. “I don’t like watching things for a concept. I’m here for what the characters are feeling, what I’m going to learn, how I’m going to keep this film with me in some way. To give an audience the gift of getting it all out in a safe dark room – that’s a rare opportunity. So yes, say it while you can. Say it while everyone’s alive. Be brave.”

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