THE POWER OF GHOSTS

Circumnavigating my way around a review of 'All Of Us Strangers' (2024) without revealing any spoilers for those who haven't yet seen it should be interesting. Needless to say, it's all about ghosts. And by ghosts I mean both dead and alive, for in the case of the lonely souls in this movie that distinction makes little difference in regard to who's actually haunting whom.

Adam (Andrew Scott) is a screenwriter who is revisiting memories of the past for a writing project which unleashes repressed memories from his childhood. In that space where the present converges with the past, Andrew finds himself become increasingly dissociative in London where he lives and works. An awkward exchange with a fellow inhabitant (Paul Mescal) from the tower block he lives in prompts him to examine his ability to engage in a romantic relationship whilst still resolving issues related to trauma suffered from his personal history.

The film has already been hailed as a classic of “queer“ cinema and it does seem that the deliberate intention of the socialist director Andrew Haigh was to address the alienation of gay people who found themselves judged for their sexuality in 1980s 'Thatcher's' Britain. Personally, I dislike the term "queer" cinema (or indeed any overt race/gender/group identity classification of a film) as it seems hugely reductive to the potential of the work's universality as simply a great human story. When I cried watching John Singleton's 'Boyz' N The Hood' (1991) in my early teens I didn't consciously think of it as a 'black film' but as a contemporary tragedy of human lives. Of course, some might say that simplistic assessment is a luxury afforded due to my 'white privilege' but as that epithet is inherently racist I'll ignore it, as it is my human privilege to state that bigotry in any context is just that, bigotry. However, to be clear, Adam's queer identity in the film does speak of a type of isolation that derives from the transience and insecurity of gay culture at a certain time in England's history and plays a significant part in why he is the damaged way he is as a 40-something male homosexual. Considering the original book 'Strangers' (1987) by Taichi Yamada on which the film is based has none of this emotive sexual identitarianism, it could have gone horribly wrong as an adaptation but overall I believe it works (for the most part) effectively, precisely because of this divergence from the source material. Clearly, Haigh wrote the adaptation based on some of his own personal experience as a gay man and there is a truth to his 'lived' experience throughout the film that brings a genuine authenticity to the characters' suffering. Unfortunately, there is also some very heavy handed writing in the screenplay at times where the barely subtextual issues of the movie might as well be announced with a giant gong just so there can be no mistaking the themes the director wants to bring to the fore for the audience. Happily, those issues become far less prominent in the second half of the movie which finally releases the bigger themes from the shackles of the film's initial narrow focus.

Occasional issues with the screenplay aside though, there's just something about the look in Scott's eyes that captures the lost child inside Adam which is utterly compelling and the atmosphere of Haigh's movie is exemplary in creating what I can only describe as an M.R James-style ghost story for the atomised 21st Century. London also seems to have its own identity crisis in the movie where all of its innate character and history has become generic and bland, like a soft focus screensaver, similar in a way to the non specific 'global city' of Spike Jonze's romantic/sci-fi movie 'Her' (2013). At times Adam appears to merely exist in this claustrophobic urban world which also captures some of that innate existential Tokyo flavour from its original literary source material. Japan, like England has a long tradition of ghost story culture in both its literature and its cinema. Perhaps this has something to do with both nations' propensity to look back to the past where memories and nostalgia offer comfort amidst turbulent and chaotic times.

For me, where the film scores big is on how it deals with the issues of the long term effects of grief and how it can cling onto us like an emotional straitjacket, preventing us from moving on with our lives in the present. Adam's emotional introspection (encouraged through his creative vocation) is a process that threatens to keep him imprisoned in a past that can never be fully resolved. I can relate to some extent as over the past few years I have repeatedly written (for this very blog) about the loss of my late father as a way of both preserving his memory and a fear of forgetting things about him. So, too, have I observed the grief suffered by someone close to me who lives similarly to Adam in the city and the loneliness of their emotional hangover from losing both their parents which has remained like a permanent scar on their psyche. Haigh's film challenges us to ask at what point does our grief define our life moving forward, the choices we make and how we balance what we've lost with what we still might gain.

It's rare to watch a movie with an audience where the silences of the film are allowed to remain silent and not routinely violated with the sound of rustling, munching and swiping up of smart phone screens with each moment lived as if being viewed by one collective consciousness. I had such a feeling with 'All Of Us Strangers' which should now find its place alongside such other ghostly classics as 'The Uninvited' (1944), 'The Innocents' (1961) and 'The Changeling' (1980). It didn't quite reach the masterpiece status of Wong Kar Wai's 'Happy Together' (1997) which transcended its own use of queer sexuality to achieve a genuinely universal meditation on loneliness, isolation and togetherness in love and life like few others. 'All Of Us Strangers' for all of its brilliance at times cannot escape its own heavy focus on the sexuality of the characters which diminishes its ambition in my eyes to some extent, though for some that will be its greatest virtue.

On a less serious note, I found myself having my own Proustian moment of remembrance past when Adam plays The Housemartins' 'Build' from his vinyl copy of 'Now That's What I Call Music'. I can remember having both the same compilation album on cassette plus the original single which I played on repeat for an entire weekend when it first came out. Strangely, with its theme of construction, it reminded me of my architect father who was mid-way through building his family home around the time it came out in 1987 (which, coincidentally was when Yamada's book 'Strangers' was originally published in Japan).

It seems memories don't go anywhere, really. They just wait, like ghosts in the shadows to be called back to mind.