All of Us Strangers, the latest from writer/director Andrew Haigh (Looking, Lean on Pete, 45 Years), takes the guts of a more straightforward ghost story in Taichi Yamada’s Strangers, and pulls it out of the realm of explicit genre horror and into something more ambiguous. And in its own way, more loving.

Haigh and the central performance from Andrew Scott as isolated Gay screenwriter Adam, frame the notion of contacting the dead as a kind of abstract nostalgia therapy. As Adam grows closer to his neighbour Harry (Paul Mescal), he suddenly finds himself in his childhood home with his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy)… even though they died when he was still a child. It’s framed pragmatically, where the facticity of whether this is actually a ghost encounter or just a by-product of a mind addled by loneliness and longing, is rather beside the point, instead focusing on the practical effect of such a thing.

Through that lens, the film delves into the very specific malaise among Adam’s generation, in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic and less-than-ideal societal views concerning homosexuality, along with more modern anxieties around the still-open wound of COVID lockdowns.

The chemistry between all of the actors is what really sells the exploration of grief and love as ethereal experiences. Scott can go from warm to haunted without missing a beat, and it is frankly ridiculous just how cute he and Mescal are together. Then there’s Bell and Foy, who nail the mood of impermanence that befits their characters, as it’s not always clear if this is genuinely them or just Adam’s memories. There’s an earnest warmth in their demeanours, but also an ever-present distance.

The presentation does a lot of the heavy lifting, with Jonathan Alberts’ regular use of cross-fades creating a hallucinogenic effect that lingers even outside of the moments that are directly influenced by illicit substances. When Jamie D. Ramsay’s cinematography aims to truly unsettle, it invokes imagery that looks like it was dragged kicking and screaming out of a fresh K-hole.

As naturally funny and weepy as it is, All of Us Strangers runs into problems when it comes to how the subject of trauma, and specifically Gay trauma, is treated. Where the better Gay films from this year (Theatre Camp, Dicks: The Musical, Bottoms) made their mark by rejecting the more Oscar bait-y tropes and cliches that Gay stories tend to be saddled with, this one… well, it mostly earns its intensive emotional impacts, but then it takes a turn that ends up souring the sentiments surrounding it. Without getting into spoilers, the last 10-or-so minutes could be excised completely, and the film would come out much better for it.

But even with that hang-up, it’s difficult to deny just how effective All of Us Strangers is in the moment. It’s a ghost story where the horror isn’t from the presence of the ghosts, but from the want to embrace them. Haigh toys around with psychological and magical realist textures to create a deep dive into the things that hold us back from being able to truly feel, showing both the healing and harmful effects of nostalgia in a way that does the sensation more justice than it tends to get in a market ever-ready to exploit it for audience dosh. It has trouble sticking the landing, but there’s still something about the whole experience that creates its own kind of longing.

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