Kritiken

It's an intimate, thoughtful, and beautiful rumination on grief that unfortunately subverts its own message by the end.

It’s good fortune that Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers avoids political fashion to get at the elusive truth of his hero Adam (Andrew Scott), resulting in the year’s most emotionally astute movie.

All of Us Strangers offers an intimate view of gay life that feels unique, and uniquely sensitive, even in the year of our lord 2023. The sex scenes between the actors have more than their share of heat thanks to the chemistry between these performers, but it’s the extraordinary tenderness between these characters that makes you feel like a voyeur.

The plot of All of Us Strangers makes it sound like a ghost story, and the details may lead you to expect violin strings and treacly melodrama. You can put those expectations aside. Andrew Haigh's eloquent, beautifully nuanced film is something entirely different.

All of Us Strangers, which was directed by Andrew Haigh and adapted from Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel, Strangers, is two movies trying to be one movie... the love story is also, deliberately or not, as exasperatingly airless as Adam’s apartment...

Andrew Haigh’s eerie romantic drama All of Us Strangers is a personal, painful trip through time... The film comes staggeringly close to being a masterpiece, except for an off-kilter conclusion that doesn’t quite fit the preceding drama.

“All of Us Strangers” acts as a prism through which loneliness and its manifestations are refracted, like colorful light onto a wall.

For all its open-heartedness, All of Us Strangers doesn’t peddle easy uplift. The movie suggests that loneliness, isolation or ostracization – whether created by circumstance or intolerance – don’t heal like normal physical wounds... A lot of movies attempt to replicate the experience of a dream; this one situates itself right on the edge, whether ecstatic or delirious or stricken, of waking up.

More than any great movie I can remember, Andrew Haigh’s “All of Us Strangers” captures the eerie, disorienting and utterly sacred experience of encountering a lost loved one in your dreams.

By suspending the viewer between liminal locales, All of Us Strangers clearly aims at a kind of otherworldly frisson, a sense of the unknowable. Mostly, though, it is just sad, somber, and a touch strained.

Despite my impatience with the segments devoted to Adam’s metaphysical encounters with his mother and father, much of All of Us Strangers continues the emotional and erotic acuity found in Haigh’s previous work.

It is a sign of Haigh’s dexterity as a filmmaker that the ghost element of the story feels completely natural, weaving in the universal, impossible fantasy of bridging the gap between parents and children, with both sides flawed but full of love for each other. All of Us Strangers is a miraculously uncheesy study of loneliness, forgiveness and, above all, the power of love.