“All of Us Strangers” is a lovely way to begin 2024, not because it’s especially seasonal — though one key scene takes place around Christmastime — but because it’s just so beautifully acted and tenderly observant. Writer-director Andrew Haigh’s drama made a lot of Top 10 lists for 2023. I always miss two or three such films around the holiday crunchtime. The upside, with “All of Us Strangers” in limited theatrical release, is the opportunity to start the year on a high note.
We meet Adam, played by Andrew Scott, alone in a newly built London high-rise, conspicuously light on residents. He’s a writer, accustomed to solitude, and to living a cautious life mostly inside his imagination.
Lately, he has begun a screenplay about his parents, played in Haigh’s film by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, and an early close-up of a document on Adam’s laptop reads “EXT. (exterior) SUBURBAN HOUSE 1987.” As we learn soon enough, that year, 1987, changed then-12-year-old Adam’s life forever.
In his apartment Adam hears a knock; it’s Harry, another man who lives in the building, drunk and available. They have spied each other from a distance but never spoken. Played by Paul Mescal, Harry makes a pass at Adam (who’s also gay) but Adam declines, politely. In more sober circumstances, some time later after awkward small talk in the elevator, they get together. And across an unfixed, undetermined number of days and nights, their story becomes the love story of “All of Us Strangers.”