Strangers

‘It reflects the ignorance of a less tolerant era and the lingering emotional damage this continues to inflict’Peter TatchellIf you are looking for a sweet, affirmative, feelgood gay movie, All of Us Strangers is probably not for you. It’s a dark, gut-wrenching love story, with a plotline that blurs reality and fantasy.Adam is an isolated, emotionally damaged gay man. He’s struggling to come to terms with the death of his parents when he was 12, and to overcome the sense of outsider otherness he feels on account of his…

Behind-the-scenes footage shows how All of Us Strangers was filmed on the London Underground.Andrew Haigh’s film follows Adam (Andrew Scott), who develops a relationship with Harry, a neighbour played by Paul Mescal.Footage posted by Transport for London shows the film crew setting up a Waterloo and City line train at Bank station, with Scott and Mescal sitting in the carriage together.The Irish actor, 27, described the script as “one of the most beautiful” he had ever read as he spoke to reporters on the red carpet at…

Homegrown experimentalism reigned supreme at the London Critics’ Circle awards, which gave its top honours to Jonathan Glazer’s radical Holocaust film, The Zone of Interest – and an equal number to Andrew Haigh’s devastating ghost romance, All of Us Strangers.The Zone of Interest, about the domestic idyll constructed by Helga and Rudolph Höss next door to Auschwitz, where he was camp commandant, won best picture and best director.Glazer thanked critics, audiences, his colleagues, “and most of all my wife, as it’s all…

There’s a half smile that flickers over the face of Andrew Scott, an involuntary wince of a thing, with lips clamped shut and those dark, dark eyes glittering with unshed tears. It’s technically a smile, but I can’t recall seeing anyone look sadder. The actor has a rare gift for peeling back the skin of a character with a single glance, drawing us into decades of kaleidoscoping pain and loss. It’s a gift that has rarely been put to better use than in Andrew Haigh’s gorgeous, shattering and deeply personal fifth feature…

So … did you cry? All of Us Strangers has finally been released in the UK after leaving cinemagoers in the US, and at various film festivals, in floods. It’s won seven gongs at the British Independent Film awards and is up for six Baftas, but no Oscars – whatever. For me, the film’s achievement is the way it’s managed to talk about love, grief and loneliness in such a powerful and original way. I first saw it at the end of September when it hit me like a ton of bricks, and I can honestly say that I’ve thought about it…

Meta is clamping down further on who sends messages to teen users on Facebook and Instagram.The social media company, on Thursday, announced new tools and features to limit teens’ abilities to see content on the two platforms that could be sensitive. Foremost among those is a new restriction on who can send them direct messages.Effective immediately, users under the age of 16 (or 18 in certain unnamed countries) will no longer be able to receive messages from people they’re not friends with on either platform—even if the…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeA thunderous ache stretches across Andrew Scott’s features in All of Us Strangers. His eyes are softly lidded, his lips twisted. In Andrew Haigh’s melancholy ghost story, where real ghosts are out-haunted by words left unsaid, Scott, an actor of fierce intelligence, channels shrewdness into tragedy for the greatest performance of his career.He plays Adam, a frustrated screenwriter…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeAndrew Scott has shared his view on the negative impact of assuming a child’s sexuality in a new interview.The 47-year-old actor has been widely praised for his performance in the drama All of Us Strangers, in which his character, screenwriter Adam, finds himself drawn to his neighbour Harry (played by Paul Mescal) while dealing with his grief over the death of his parents.Scott, who…

Paul Mescal has opened up on the "blind panic" he felt before filming began on All of Us Strangers.The film follows Adam (Andrew Scott), who develops a relationship with a neighbour played by the Normal People star.The Irish actor, 27, described the script as "one of the most beautiful" he had ever read as he spoke to reporters on the red carpet at the film's London gala screening.Mescal said: "The work becomes a hell of a lot easier when you're working with actors like Andrew and directors like Andrew Haigh." Paul…

Andrew Haigh’s mysterious, beautiful and sentimental film is a fantasy-supernatural romance about loneliness and love. It concerns the climacteric of middle age when you realise you are probably nearer to death than birth, there is no guarantee that you will live your life inside a relationship and your parents were ordinary, vulnerable people – just like you.All of Us Strangers is adapted by Haigh from the Japanese novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, translated into English by Wayne Lammers (already filmed in Japanese),…