Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is a stunning, surreal meditation on grief, memory, and the aching human need for connection. At once beautiful and heartbreaking, the film exists in a space between the living and the dead, between reality and something more ineffable—a limbo both literal and emotional.
The cinematography is breathtaking. Each frame feels at once ghostly and tactile, bathed in soft light and shadow that gives everything a dreamlike haze. This really heightens the romance of the story. The flat where Adam Scott’s character, Adam, lives functions almost like a liminal space—an in-between zone untouched by time, suspended between the past and present. The eerie stillness of suburban London, stripped of its usual bustle, adds to the feeling that we’re watching someone drift between planes of existence.
Scott’s performance is a masterclass in quiet devastation. His character is held in stasis by grief, unable—or perhaps unwilling—to move forward. This emotional paralysis creates a doorway, one that allows the dead to return in the form of his long-deceased parents. The quasi-magical realism of their return feels earned, not fantastical but deeply human—rooted in longing.
Every conversation between Adam and his parents tears the heart. These moments are rendered with such intimacy that they begin to feel like intrusions into someone else’s most private pain. The film is, in many ways, the cinematic equivalent of someone asking, “Are you okay?”—at exactly the wrong moment. Or the right one. It opens the floodgates. By the time “The Power of Love” plays, not as nostalgia but as a gut punch, the emotional groundwork has been so delicately laid that the song lands like a dagger. You’ll never hear it the same way again.
In My Humble Opinion 