‘All Of Us Strangers’ review: the saddest film of the year

If Die Hard is a Christmas film, so is All Of Us Strangers – a festive story that surely only wasn’t released a month ago because it would have ruined the holidays by leaving everyone in floods of tears. A cold late January is far better timing for the saddest film of the year though (if anything manages to beat it, 2024 is going to be tough one…), if only to let the flashes of warmth feel all the more important to cling onto when you walk out of the cinema. In All Of Us Strangers, indie director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years) makes a film to be treasured – wounding and healing like a traumatic memory – and an early contender for the best of the year.

Here’s Adam (Andrew Scott), hanging decorations with his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy); sat on the floor like a child as if any of this is normal. As if he’s not a grown man coping with loneliness and depression, and as if his parents didn’t both die in a car crash 30 years ago. Real ghost stories are more about the unfinished business of those left behind, and Adam’s pain lies in everything he never managed to say to his family after the age of 12 – now somehow given the chance after he revisits his old childhood home and finds his mum and dad still alive, exactly as they were the night before they died.

Growing up gay but robbed of his own coming out story, Adam has all the conversations he might have had as a teenager – finally dealing with everything he left buried back in the past. And it works. Now sparking a relationship with Harry (Paul Mescal), the only other man in his block, Adam’s life starts to find hope and meaning the more time he spends back in his perfect 1980s Christmas.

Blending bits of It’s A Wonderful Life, Tom’s Midnight Garden and 2021’s Petite Maman in reverse, All Of Us Strangers is the kind of ghost story that frightens with feeling; coming back at night to hollow you out and make you hug the people closest. There’s a flicker of Aftersun, too, in the way Haigh deals with memories: Paul Mescal somehow managing to pick two of the best British indie scripts in years inside the same 12 months for two of his finest roles to date.

It’s Scott, though, that really carries the heart of the whole film. Hiding his childhood vulnerability under the flimsiest shreds of adulthood, Scott gives the kind of honest, emotional, deeply personal performance that could only be cheapened by an armful of awards. Haigh, too, will undoubtedly spend the next few months making well-deserved acceptance speeches, but there’s something about All Of Us Strangers that elevates it above all of that.

It might be brutally upsetting at times, but Haigh’s film disarms you with its tenderness – leaving you with something much more profound to say about the connections we make and break along the way. Less a tragic nightmare than a beautiful, melancholic dream, All Of Us Strangers is one to keep close.