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 the film in the actual suburban house he grew up in, lending 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). Returning to his childhood home, he finds his parents — Claire Foy and Jamie Bell — alive and unchanged since their deaths decades earlier. Haigh and cinematographer Jamie Ramsay bathe the film in soft, dissolving light, while a needle-drop soundtrack anchored by the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song that gives the film its mood threads through the grief. The four-hander rests on performances of 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 drew six BAFTA nominations. Widely cited among the year's best, it was praised as a landmark of queer cinema and one of the most affecting films ever made about mourning, memory and the families — chosen and given — that shape us.