All of Us Strangers comes packaged as a movie that is going to be hard to watch, not hiding that it isn’t easy to digest. Following Adam (Andrew Scott) as he goes back in time and talk to his dead parents, it already gives us all a hopeful chance at the closure that those who have lost a parent long for.
While the movie itself has deeper feelings of loss and hope and ideas of being able to redo things we’ve done wrong in our lives, what All of Us Strangers leaves you with by the end of the film is a sense of hope despite the weight of the story. If you understand the pain of losing a parent, you know that if you had the chance to see them again, you’d hope that you could say things you never had the chance to.
While Adam’s loss of his mom and dad was a bit more tragic than some of us will ever experience and a lot of his newer trauma with them came from his mom (Claire Foy) coming to terms with her son’s homosexuality in a very 1980s way (badly) mixed with his Dad’s (Jamie Bell) admission that he always kind of knew but still let his machismo keep him from being there for Adam, the movie still manages to give us moments that many of us in that grief-stricken state wish we could experience.
The loss of a parent doesn’t just go away
All of Us Strangers is weirdly hopeful in the midst of just waves of angst. Whatever pain Adam is going through, we feel it. That gasping pain that left me walking around New York City for a full hour after I saw the movie, wandering around and just trying to see the beauty around me because that’s what I needed after watching the movie.
In the midst of that, I also saw the happiness that Adam found in a second chance with his parents—even in the hard conversations with his mom when he was coming out, when he was talking about crying in his room and his dad overhearing him and leaving him alone.
The moment that really hurt reminded me that even in the joyful idea of getting to talk to your parent again after they’re gone is the knowledge that you couldn’t keep them forever. I would move heaven and earth to talk to my dad again. I know that it couldn’t last, that to talk to him would still have to be a brief moment and he would need to move on because he can’t stay trapped in this world for my benefit, much like how Adam has to let his parents go.
Getting to see that beautiful diner scene when he is left with three milkshakes alone and has to come to terms with a world without his parents? It’s a pain that those of us who lost our parents know, and it reminds us that we’re not alone in that pain. All of Us Strangers is a hard watch but one that is necessary and emotional.
(featured image: Searchlight Pictures)
