I tend to be wary of movies talked up as tear-jerkers – going into any film with an expected or prescribed emotional reaction kind of sets the body up to resist. If you’ve heard anything about Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, it’s probably something along those lines. “This film will destroy you,” a colleague told me before I saw it last summer. (Should we be enticed by such a promise?) But then it did: not aggressively or unpleasantly, but by slow degrees, continuing in the weeks and months after I saw it, the memory of it returning and lingering like a deep bruise when my father died last November.
Haigh’s artful, unexpected ghost story, now streamable on Disney+ and elsewhere, sensitively presses on a number of psychological sore points: grief, loneliness and queer anxiety among them. But they’re all bound by that most reliable of sources for cinematic pathos: the adult revisitation of childhood – in this case a literal one, as Andrew Scott’s trauma-burdened protagonist returns to his childhood home in Dorking, only to find his parents – killed in a car crash when he was a boy – living there, seemingly alive and well, practically the same age as he is now. It’s a supernatural leap that enables a rich, anguished reflection on the selves we leave behind as we grow up, and how they might communicate with each other. Would the younger you, to say nothing of your younger parents, recognise the older you?
It’s a question that films often address via gentle flights of fantasy, be it the body-swap trope – as in the formulaic but surprisingly winning teen comedy 17 Again (2009), in which a disillusioned, 37-year-old Matthew Perry is transformed back into his 17-year-old, Zac Efron-resembling self with suitably chaotic and ultimately self-redeeming results – or that of time travel. Playing the idea mostly straight rather than Back to the Future levels of zany, Francis Ford Coppola’s atypically sweet but rather underrated Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) sees Kathleen Turner whisked back to her teenage life on the evening of her high school reunion, faced again with the life-altering choices she may since have come to regret. If the film’s morals run a little pat – turns out there’s no place like home – Turner’s clever performance gives it an edge of grown-up melancholy.
Ate de Jong’s very peculiar black comedy Drop Dead Fred (1991) has a terrific premise: when a woman (Phoebe Cates) goes back to her childhood home after her life falls apart, her maniacal imaginary best friend (Rik Mayall) from those days returns to haunt her. The tone slides from cheerfully juvenile farce to more tortured psycho-comedy, but the film is undeserving of the critical drubbing it got on release: it’s notably frank in its exploration of enduring childhood anxiety and emotional abuse. Céline Sciamma’s tiny, beautifully formed Petite Maman (2021; Mubi and more), meanwhile, delicately twists the idea of an uncanny childhood return across generations. Mourning the recent death of her grandmother, eight-year-old Nelly befriends her mother at the same age, gradually seeing in her a magic mirror of who she is and will become.
Of course, you don’t necessarily need fantasy to put the past in dialogue with the present. Memory does all the transportive work in Isao Takahata’s lovely 1991 anime Only Yesterday (Netflix), in which a young, unmarried Tokyo woman takes a countryside vacation that cues a series of bittersweet reminiscences, as happily ordinary childhood recollections throw the empty spaces of her adult life into relief. In Charlotte Wells’s justly acclaimed Aftersun (2022), meanwhile, sun-bleached vignettes from a childhood holiday eventually bristle against flash-forwards to a darker, grief-scarred adult future. In Wells’s film (on BBC iPlayer), a daughter eventually comes to terms with her father’s own weaknesses. Spanish director Victor Erice’s exquisitely moving El Sur (1983; BFI Player) explores a similar idea without following the girl to adulthood, instead bringing a tenderly young perspective to revelations of a parent’s past.
Youthful trauma is more directly and severely confronted in Jennifer Fox’s gutsily autobiographical 2018 drama The Tale. An excellent Laura Dern plays Fox’s alter ego, a documentary film-maker working on a project about childhood rape victims, which belatedly brings about a reckoning with the sexual abuse she experienced as a girl. The metatextual conceit doesn’t dilute the film’s raw impact: not all returns to childhood are warmed by nostalgia.
All titles available to rent on multiple platforms unless specified.
Also new on streaming
Road House
(Amazon)
It’s generally agreed that it’s better to remake films that offer ample room for improvement, though when it comes to the 1989 Patrick Swayze trash classic – now a staple of so-bad-it’s-good midnight movie marathons – it’s hard to say if polishing it up makes it better or worse. Doug Liman’s update, starring a staunchly committed Jake Gyllenhaal as a former UFC fighter guarding a sinister Florida roadside bar, is handsomely executed and sleekly ultraviolent. But is it as much fun?
Poor Things
(Disney)
Fresh from its Oscar-night triumph, including a well-deserved win for Emma Stone’s go-for-broke lead performance, Yorgos Lanthimos’s riotous, extravagantly imagined take on Alasdair Gray’s novel meshes lurid Frankenstein mythos with a humane female coming-of-age arc, all to deliriously entertaining effect.
Anatomy of a Fall
(Picturehouse)
The marketing for Justine Triet’s enthralling, Palme d’Or-winning courtroom drama, revolving around a celebrated author suspected of murdering her insecure husband, hinged on a “did she do it” angle that seems almost immaterial beside the film’s sophisticated tangle of relationship tensions and gender politics.
