Underneath the radical swoon of Andrew Haigh’s ground-shifting gay drama Weekend was a swell of sadness. Clearer in the film’s more universal right-people-wrong-time romance but also in the more specific, and knottier, queerness. It was a rare, giddy uplift to see young gay men fall headfirst for each other with such believable and unfettered intimacy but their affection existed in a world full of caveats – where to kiss, how to act, who to be – and it was only in privacy that they could really be themselves. “When I’m at home I’m absolutely fine,” Tom Cullen’s Russell says. “I’m happy being gay … It’s when I go outside …”
Twelve years later in All of Us Strangers, Haigh’s first film about gay characters since, what lies outside has dramatically changed. Same-sex marriage has been legalised. Gay culture at large has been more widely embraced, from Heartstopper to Queer Eye to Drag Race. It has, allegedly, got better. But for Andrew Scott’s lonely gay writer, Adam, things remain troubled on the inside, a fix to the political not enough to mend the personal, living like Cullen’s Weekend protagonist before him, in a high-rise far away from everyone and everything else. This time it’s not just on the edge of a city but on the edge of the world, eerily close to that of another, on the precipice between the living and the dead.
