There’s a half smile that flickers over the face of Andrew Scott, an involuntary wince of a thing, with lips clamped shut and those dark, dark eyes glittering with unshed tears. It’s technically a smile, but I can’t recall seeing anyone look sadder. The actor has a rare gift for peeling back the skin of a character with a single glance, drawing us into decades of kaleidoscoping pain and loss. It’s a gift that has rarely been put to better use than in Andrew Haigh’s gorgeous, shattering and deeply personal fifth feature film, All of Us Strangers.
Scott plays Adam, a screenwriter wrestling with a script drawn from his past. It’s not going well. Our first glimpse is of his face, reflected in the windows of his flat as he gazes listlessly at the London dusk, a wide-open sky massed with clouds as deep and dark blue as grief itself. Adam immerses himself in the music of his childhood – 80s queer pop classics by Pet Shop Boys and Frankie Goes to Hollywood – and picks through a box of family treasures that provide a link to the distant past. But he seems disconnected from the rest of the world – something that his echoing, neatly impersonal flat in a nearly empty Ballardian tower block only serves to emphasise.
