All of Us Strangers

Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers arrived in 2023 to some of the warmest reviews of the British director's career, after the spare romance of Weekend and the marital chamber piece 45 Years. Loosely adapted from Taichi Yamada's 1987 novel Strangers, it premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and was distributed by Searchlight. Haigh shot part of it in the suburban house he grew up in, which gives the memory-soaked material an unusual personal charge.

Andrew Scott plays Adam, a solitary screenwriter in a near-empty London high-rise who begins a fragile romance with his neighbour Harry (Paul Mescal). When he goes back to his childhood home, he finds his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) alive and unchanged since their deaths decades earlier. Haigh and the cinematographer Jamie Ramsay bathe the film in soft, dissolving light, and a needle-drop soundtrack, anchored by the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song that sets its mood, threads through the grief. The four performances have an extraordinary tenderness, Scott's above all.

The film swept the British Independent Film Awards, winning Best British Independent Film along with prizes for Haigh's direction, screenplay, cinematography and editing, and it drew six BAFTA nominations. It turned up on many lists of the year's best. For us it is a major work of queer cinema and one of the most affecting films anyone has made about mourning, memory and the families, chosen and given, that shape a life.