Film review: Andrew Scott's truly great in orphan tale that'll move many to tears

Andrew Scott will not hold aloft the Oscar statuette for his dazzling performance in All Of Us Strangers. Indeed, the film was overlooked entirely in the Academy Award nominations. But he will hold the acclaim of everyone else, certainly if Tuesday’s gala screening in London was anything to go by.

The evening’s presenter Edith Bowman called the movie a masterpiece and credited him with one of the greatest displays of acting in modern times. At the end, when she invited him back to the stage, a rhapsodic ovation lifted the roof.

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The writer and director of All Of Us Strangers (which is loosely based on a 1987 Japanese novel) is Andrew Haigh, whose marvellous 2015 film, 45 Years, might in a way be a companion piece to this.

Andrew Scott. Pic: Anthony Harvey/REX/Shutterstock

Both films are about love, loss and the fierce complexities of human relationships. Moreover, they are both enhanced by truly immaculate acting. In All Of Us Strangers, that’s especially true for Andrew Scott.

He plays Adam, a screenwriter, who, when we first meet him in his high-rise city apartment, appears to be living a life of, at best, wistful solitude. On TV he is watching Frankie Goes To Hollywood performing The Power Of Love, a recurring motif in the film and an indication both of his sexuality and the sentimental lure of the mid-1980s, for reasons we will come to understand.

Paul Mescal in All Of Us Strangers. Pic: Searchlight Pictures

Then Adam meets a neighbour, Harry (Paul Mescal), and in due course they become lovers. But he remains deeply affected by the deaths of his mother (Claire Foy) and father (Bell) in a car crash, when he was 11. Clutching a faded old photograph of their suburban home, he returns to the same house and, his memories unlocking his imagination, finds his parents still there, just as he remembers them from the 1980s.

His relationship with Harry develops, interspersed with these imaginary visits home, where he explains how his life has unfolded since he was so abruptly orphaned and tells his mother he is gay. She reacts like a 1980s mum, worried about Aids, and wondering whether he is open about it ‘down the High Street, at WH Smiths’. His dad is less surprised. As a kid, Adam could never throw a ball properly. He always knew he was a bit ‘tutti-frutti’.

Paul Mescal, Claire Foy and Andrew Scott. Pic: Anthony Harvey/REX/Shutterstock

These encounters, ‘meeting’ his parents on adult terms for the first time, yet still occasionally regressing to prepubescence (even, in one scene, wearing his boyhood pyjamas), are beautifully done.

Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott at the Irish premiere of All Of Us Strangers. Pic: Andres Poveda

All Of Us Strangers also contains a final twist that I mustn’t reveal but was still prompting an exchange of texts the next morning between me and the friend I saw it with. A masterpiece? Not quite. But what a thoughtful and thought-provoking film.

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