★★★★★

The Sun seems perpetually ready to set in and upon All of Us Strangers, an achingly personal new romance by Lean on Pete director Andrew Haigh. It’s befitting of a film that enjoys that very Shakespearean notion of a tale told entirely in the twilight hours. Certainly, there’s something implicitly theatrical about the premise, which dances, at times, on the peripheral edges of gimmickry. Such concerns are, however, offset by the astounding rawness of Haigh’s own emotional engagement with the narrative. This is no autobiographical feature – the film takes inspiration from the 1987 Taichi Yamada novel, Strangers – but it is no less enthused with the outpouring of a heart fully opened.

Andrew Scott plays Adam, a desperately lonely writer in a lonelier still London. He’s one of two residents in a new outer-city high rise, a bleakly corporate block, more hotel than home. The other is Paul Mescal’s Harry, a young hedonist whose sole companion as the film opens is the rapidly emptying bottle of whisky he cradles. Absent love haunts the building’s empty rooms. Adam’s parents died in a tragic accident when he was just twelve, Harry’s are accepting of him but never visit. In shared solitude, the pair find similitude. Tender romance blossoms. It’s gentle, uncertain and beautifully done.

Struggling to pen his latest script – ‘I’m not a proper writer. I write for films…and TV, when I have to’ – Adam heads to the borough of his childhood. Here’s where the fantastical steps into gear. In a local park, Adam’s father appears from afar and guides him home. Adam’s parents are alive and well – or so it seems – in the house, albeit exactly as he remembers them from his formative years. The years, months, weeks and days before they died. Claire Foy and Jamie Bell are exquisite as Adam’s parents, unnamed but for Mum and Dad. This is his memory, after all. Haigh shoots their introduction as akin to old home video snapshots, the haze of nostalgia heightened by the 35mm with which he films. His camera is intimate, frenetically familiar and awash with warmth.

Later the lens will cool as Haigh uncovers the sharper corners of a painful past. There’s no softening of old attitudes – Adam’s mother frets he will contract HIV on learning of his sexuality – but it makes for a fascinating point of inquisition as Haigh wonders aloud what an orphan might ask his parents given the opportunity. The approach is fascinating, gently gripping as the puzzle unpacks. Scott is extraordinary in capturing the nuance of a man torn between the past and present, increasingly insular in his mediations. In the company of Harry, Adam wears world-weary eyes, streaked with pain. Drawn back into the parental fold, these old eyes widen, returned to childhood innocence. Scott is older than Foy and Bell but plays much younger, convincingly so.

This really is astonishing storytelling. Haigh’s visuals stun, each scene sublimely coloured by an increasingly impressive Jamie D. Ramsay, as his writing cuts to the very core of the human psyche. It’s a deeply emotional tale, intricate and experientially specific but somehow universally resonant. You don’t have to be a lonely, gay man in your forties to know what it is to yearn that the sunset might hold off just that little bit longer. There is, likewise, something gorgeously familiar about Haigh’s ear for a turn of phrase. Best of these comes as Adam’s mother learns of her son’s achievements and squeals: ‘If I knew the neighbours, I’d run round and tell them’. It’s a lovely line in a film loaded with them.

Such is, of course, Haigh’s talent as a writer. And yet, here, it is a marker too of just how closely All of Us Strangers is drawn from Haigh’s own lived experience. Write what you know, as they say. To that end, it is a pleasure to be privy to the opening of so brilliant a mind as it explores the intricacies of romantic and familial love. It’s gorgeously personal.

T.S.