Two haunted buildings organize Andrew Haigh’s 2023 film All of Us Strangers: the first is a nearly empty tower block on the edge of London; the other, a suburban home in Sanderstead, Croydon. The former is filmed in moody long shots that emphasize its emptiness, two lonely apartment buildings side by side. The view from inside shows the London skyline far in the distance, marking the apartment as urban, yet remote, far from the bustling liveliness of the city, and the company of other people.1 The latter, meanwhile, offers the comforts of the proximity of family, yet feels suspended in time, untouched since the 1980s, cast in the warm, hazy sunlight of childhood nostalgia, displaced not in space, but instead in time.
All of Us Strangers, adapted from the 1987 novel Strangers by Japanese novelist Taichi Yamada, follows Adam (Andrew Scott), a lonely forty-something screenwriter living in this tower block. It is, in part, a ghost story that encapsulates a fantasy of reconciliation and resolution between Adam, a gay man, and his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), who died in a car accident driving home from a Christmas party when he was eleven. It is also a love story between Adam and Harry (Paul Mescal), a younger inhabitant of the same apartment building, with whom he has an unexpected run-in one night and then falls into a romantic relationship. Revisiting his childhood home, Adam heals old wounds living out much-needed conversations with the ghosts of his young parents—coming out to his mother, coming to terms with his father’s treatment of him. Simultaneously in his London apartment, where he has locked himself away from the world, he learns to open himself up again to the possibility of a less lonely life with Harry.
Adam’s parents are self-evidently ghosts, come back to haunt Adam or conjured up by him in a moment of need, haunting the space of the old family home. But, as the end of the film reveals, Harry, too, is a ghost, haunting the empty apartment where Adam now lives: on the night they first met, Harry knocked on Adam’s door, intoxicated and desperately seeking out company, and Adam turned him away. Harry, Adam discovers in the film’s denouement, died that night of an overdose of alcohol and ketamine.
These hauntings disrupt the normative functioning of time and space: the two haunted architectures Adam inhabits exist simultaneously stretched across multiple temporalities. The present-day reality of Croydon overlaps with a string of moments far in Adam’s past, and the apartment block extends into an imagined—but not yet lived—future. Through his interactions with the ghosts of his parents, Adam can go back in time, can live out conversations with his parents he never got to have, can craft a counterfactual history that lets him cope with a grief he has long since repressed. Through his interactions with the ghost of Harry, he can live in something that might become a future, which has been foreclosed to him through this very same melancholic grief. Haunting distorts the way time and space are meant to be lived—and, in this process, throws into relief the ways in which these same normative temporalities and spatialities organize the melancholic structure of Adam’s lonely life. At the start of the film, these hauntings stretch those structures, allowing Adam to step outside of their restrictions and find space to breathe, a measured happiness that comes from the breakdown of those normative times and spaces.
And yet, these two hauntings are incompatible, and where they bump up against one another, where they begin to intersect or collide, moments of horror emerge. When Adam brings Harry to the house in Croydon to meet his parents, for instance, they find it dark and empty. Adam knocks on every door and window, but his parents will not let him in. With Harry’s outsider perspective on Adam’s interactions with his dead parents, the fact that this is a ghost story is thrown into stark relief: Harry grows serious, uncharacteristically stern, almost frightened, as the camera follows him following Adam into the back garden. “I want to go home,” he says desperately. “Let me take you home.” “This is my home,” Adam answers, but as he begs to be let in and is refused—the ghostly image of his parents perfectly still through the glass door—All of Us Strangers offers a horror-movie echo that reveals a profoundly uncomfortable truth: the space of the home that Adam’s nostalgia has brought him back here looking for is incompatible with his growing relationship with Harry.
In this moment, All of Us Strangers ties together two different sets of binary oppositions. In the form of Adam’s parents, the past—nostalgia for the 1980s, Adam’s lost childhood, and that which has been left behind—is rooted in the suburban home; in the form of Harry, the potential future finds its ties in the urban apartment. And yet, these associations are not as clear cut as they seem. “Most of my friends have moved out of London,” Adam tells Harry at one point, explaining away his loneliness: “[They] want to have gardens for their kids and they want to be near the grandparents so they can look after the kids.” The invocation of children offers a reversal in which the suburb is where the future happens, while Adam, in his childless, urban life, is stuck in a present that has no future at all.
The unspoken sentiment that places like Croydon, with gardens and grandparents and families, are places for a certain kind of person—a kind of person that Adam, a gay man, is not—does not go unspoken for long. “What am I gonna do in Dorking?” Adam jokes a moment later, though not without an underlying current of sincere feeling behind it. “It’s not for people like me.” Here, All of Us Strangers evokes the long-held association between queerness and urban spaces, and between heterosexual families and suburban ones: the suburb or town, with its room for gardens, its several-bedroomed homes, is where people move to start a family. The city is where people stay when they aren’t the sort of people who will.
The distance between these two dwellings is more than just physical. The out-of-time presence of the ghosts of Adam’s parents, the preservation of the interior of their 1980s home, and their rootedness in the suburb counterposes the two temporalities as well: the space of the city/apartment as a continuous and suspended present, and the suburb/home as a displaced past. Meanwhile, the admission that the suburb is not for “people like” him also links this displaced past to a foreclosed future. “Don’t you want to get married and have kids?” Adam’s mother asks, as they drink tea in the kitchen. “It wasn’t a possibility for such a long time,” he offers, almost defensive at the question being posed to him, “that I didn’t think it was worth the effort of wanting to get married and have kids.”
Even in the present when, as Adam reassures his mother, gays and lesbians can get married, can have kids, the family is still something being held at arm’s length for him. So, too, for Harry, who feels like a “stranger” in his own family—“my sister and her kids, my older brother who just got married.” Harry offers a spatial metaphor, here: he is on the “edge” of his family, while his siblings have “all got this spot in the center.” He is peripheral to the family, and to all its trappings; he is, quite literally, outside the family home.2 To refuse to reproduce the family—through marriage, through children—is to refuse a position of centrality within it, to refuse a space inside the home.
The refusal of the family is also temporal refusal, a refusal of the form of temporal regulation that Elizabeth Freeman calls “chrononormativity”: “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity.”3 Counter to this chrononormativity which regulates, among other things, the temporal presumption that children will eventually grow up, move to the suburbs, start their own families, is the temporal mode of what Freeman, Jack Halberstam, and others have called “queer time,” in which the diminishing sense of the future in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, as well as a detachment from the generational logics of reproduction and inheritance, produce alternative temporalities for queer life—a heightened emphasis on the present, as well as possibilities for other kinds of futures. “The constantly diminishing future,” Halberstam writes, “creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now.”4
When it isn’t being haunted by an unreachable past, All of Us Strangers lives within this very same suspended present, a perpetual moment of now-ness, emphasized by the film’s pacing, which stretches small moments out into long and languid meditations. Long takes and a static camera create the feeling that time, especially in Adam’s apartment, can stretch on endlessly in the present moment, never quite reaching the next, or finding a foothold in the future.
And yet, here queer time does not hold quite the same utopian force as it once might have. “I’d always felt lonely, even before,” Adam tells Harry, recounting the day his parents died. “This was a new feeling, like a . . . terror, that I’d always be alone now . . . Losing them, it just got tangled with all the other stuff, about being gay and . . . just a feeling like the future doesn’t matter.” Rooted both in Adam’s particularity as a gay man who grew up amidst the trauma of the AIDS epidemic, and in Haigh’s own experience as a gay man of that same generation,5 All of Us Strangers speaks directly to the sensation of queer time’s lack of future, and deliberately evokes the resulting emphasis on the present—not as, in Halberstam’s conception, a space of possibility for “new temporal logics,” but instead in a melancholy yearning for something beyond the sameness of the now.
Meanwhile, the past—Adam’s childhood home, caught perpetually as if frozen in amber—is brought to life by its accessibility: returning home, here, is as easy as taking the train. Haunting animates what has been lost, offering a reprieve from the sameness of the unchanging present. While nostalgia often tells us you can never really go home again, this haunting promises a way to step into that past and to change it: to make amends, to have conversations you never had, to go back to a home you are incapable of recreating in the future. But the fact that Harry is also a ghost complicates the easy association between the family home as a lost past and the urban apartment as a space of arrested present. The future, too, is a haunting; the lost possibilities down every road not taken are also, themselves, ghosts.
As easily as haunting disrupts these temporalities, so too does it offer new ones. As hauntings disrupt the clear lines between past, present, and future, letting Adam step effortlessly between them, the film also lapses into an assortment of other non-normative temporalities. In addition to the queer time of its protagonist, it finds itself slipping into the associative time of memory, into the anticausal spacetime of dreams, and the suspended time of the nightclub and the drug trip—what McKenzie Wark calls “k-time”: “machine time amplified to the moment where it splits from duration and takes the body sideways, possibly into enlustment, ravespace, xeno-euphoria, or other as yet unnamed aesthetics—all without memory or expectations.”6
As Adam and Harry go out dancing at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, time ceases to have meaning. Together in a bathroom stall, the two take ketamine, and, underscored by Blur’s “Death Of A Party,” the film slips from a dreamy set of dissolves in the night club; to a montage of mundane, domestic scenes in Adam’s apartment—Harry cooking breakfast, Adam working on his script while Harry reads Walden across the room, the two lying on the couch eating pizza and watching music videos, brushing their teeth after a shower; back to the nightclub, as Adam walks through the window of his own bedroom and onto the dance floor; until finally, he wakes up in the bed of his childhood home, feverish, and walks downstairs to find his parents decorating the Christmas tree.
“Is this real?” he asks his mother, as she tucks him into bed. She answers: “Does it feel real?” And though these sequences are framed within a nightmare framed within a k-hole, her question is key to understanding how haunting’s disruptions also offer something to Adam that promises an escape from the melancholic tangle of incompatibilities and incompossibilities. This moment, of being in his childhood bed again is not real; the future he fantasizes about with Harry isn’t, either. But neither are any of the conversations he has had with his parents or Harry, conversations he has had with ghosts. Nevertheless, they feel real. Though the temporalities they take place in are segmented off as less than real, as altered states and fantasies, their impact is nevertheless profoundly felt.
Almost a quarter of the film’s run-time is captured inside this dissociative k-time, between the moment Adam takes ketamine in the bathroom of the nightclub and when he wakes up with Harry the next morning. In this space, Adam is able to imagine a future—even a future as nearby as “tomorrow”—with Harry. But even that hopeful imagining is cut short by images of horror: he imagines Harry dancing with another man in the night club; he finds himself lost and disoriented, chasing Harry’s image on the Underground; when he eventually finds himself, wearing his ill-fitting childhood pajamas, in bed with his mother, and tells her about the future he imagined with her, and all the places they would have gone together if she hadn’t died, Harry’s intrusion into the scene heralds yet another impossibility of that future, as his appearance is accompanied by the blue flashing lights of police sirens outside. An omen of death, the specter of Harry carries with it the reminder of the precise moment Adam lost his family, the knock of police at the door.
Normative temporalities are incapable of capturing the full spectrum of Adam’s need to grapple with what it means to have lost a future before he even knew to want it—to have lost access to the ability to imagine a future when he lost his parents, when he realized he was gay. So, too, are the normative architectures that cover the spectrum of what we might call home: the family home, a place which carries with it the burden of generations of inherited expectation, and the urban apartment, a place of alienation and loneliness.
Instead, All of Us Strangers offers what we might, after “queer time” and “k-time,” call a “haunting time,” a temporal framework which not only blurs our readily-held associations with and distinctions between past, present, and future, but altogether escapes them.
At the end of the film, Adam and Harry lie in bed together, holding one another. As the overhead camera zooms out around them, it does not reveal Adam’s bedroom, or the space of his apartment, but instead a vast void of darkness around them. At the center of this dark space, the two of them are alone—until, in the film’s final moments, they are transformed into a single point of light, a single star in the night sky, which is soon joined by dozens of other points of light, a constellation of connection that cuts through the loneliness. Outside of space, outside of time, the hauntings of All of Us Strangers offer a glimpse into something beyond these temporalities and architectures, a possibility of other ways of moving through the world.
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Endnotes
- Haigh explains in an interview that the soundstage set for the apartment “had big LED panels with the outside of London projected on them” to create the view of the city. “Director of photography Jamie Ramsey was able to do something slightly different with the focus—the deep background outside is more in focus than it ever would be if you were shooting in a real apartment.” The city remains a constant focal point of the apartment: both its proximity and its distance. Neil Smith, “Andrew Haigh breaks down four key scenes from All of Us Strangers: ‘Half the crew were crying,” ScreenDaily, February 5, 2024. https://www.screendaily.com/features/andrew-haigh-breaks-down-four-key-scenes-from-all-of-us-strangers-half-the-crew-were-crying/5190183.article.
- Sara Ahmed argues that the family is a point of inheritance, meant to be reproduced by those who inherit it. If happiness “involves a way of being aligned with others, of facing the right way,” the queer child who fails or refuses to reproduce the “happy family,” refuses that orientation, that alignment. See: Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Duke University Press, 2010), 45.
- Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, (Duke University Press, 2010), 3.
- Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (NYU Press, 2005), 13.
- In an interview with The Guardian, Haigh expresses having felt the same bleak impossibility of a future that Adam vocalizes in the film: “It wasn’t an easy time. Growing up, I felt, ‘If I’m going to become a gay person I’m not going to have a future, and the only other alternative is not to be gay’ – which of course you can’t not be.” Alex Needham, “‘A generation of queer people are grieving for the childhood they never had’: Andrew Haigh on All of Us Strangers,” The Guardian, December 29, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/dec/29/a-generation-of-queer-people-are-grieving-for-the-childhood-they-never-had-andrew-haigh-on-all-of-us-strangers.
- McKenzie Wark, Raving (Duke University Press, 2023), 92.
Christine Prevas