All of Us Strangers

Movie Review

You can’t go home again. Or so they say.

But Adam discovers that … he can. Home, just as he remembered it. Just as it was when he was 12 years old.

Granted, he’s not felt quite himself lately. He’s been feverish. Flustered. His apartment—located, it seems, in an almost completely deserted building—doesn’t help.

“You can’t even open the windows, but I guess they don’t really want us to jump,” says Harry, who seems to be the building’s only other resident. “Bad for business, you know.” 

Harry is unsettling, too. He’s a stranger. And yet, after just a minute of conversation, he tries to invite himself into Adam’s apartment. “If not for a drink, then for whatever else you want,” he says.

Adam says no—for the moment, at least. Harry’s too bold. Adam is too fragile.

Writing about the past has a way of making one fragile. Thinking about his childhood—things said and unsaid, things done and undone—has a way of stripping the soul bare. A grown man becomes a little boy in blue pajamas, unsure and scared. He’s in no condition to begin a relationship. Not until he unpacks these old ones.

But when he takes a train to his childhood home—perhaps for inspiration, perhaps for some half-understood need—Adam finds … his parents.

Don’t just stand there, they say. Get yourself inside.

So he gets. And they talk. They’re thrilled that he’s a writer now, happy to see him looking so fit. And when it’s time to leave, his mother tells him, Come back soon. One of us will be in.

His mother. His beautiful mother, who died when Adam was 12.

You can’t go home again. Or so they say.

But if you could, would you?

And if you did, would you ever leave again?

Positive Elements

All of Us Strangers is a story rooted in relationships of all kinds. It can be difficult to parse, as the vines of those relationships intertwine and tangle, with plenty of problems wrapped up therein. But here, in this section, let’s focus on two very human needs: the need to be known and the need to be loved.

Adam grew up in a house filled with love. The affection his parents show him now is evidence of that. They’re eager to hear about his life and praise him for his successes. Adam clearly loves to spend time with them, too: He slips into old memories as if they were well-worn slippers, relishing these precious moments so mysteriously given to him.

But Adam is painfully aware of one gap in their relationship: They never knew he was gay.

They died when Adam was 12, you’ll remember. And while he was aware of his same-sex attraction back then, he was terrified of telling his parents (if he even completely understood and accepted his sexual leanings himself). They died, Adam feels, before they knew all of him. Now—through this inexplicable prism—he feels he must tell both of them. He doesn’t just want his mom and dad to love the boy they remember, but the man he is now, in whole.

Adam’s desire to be known and loved certainly comes with issues, which we’ll continue to unpack as this review goes on. But that desire, to be known and loved, is a universal one. And I think that it’s one that we should be mindful of, especially as parents.

Certainly, to uncritically accept all the thoughts and actions of anyone—be that person a child or a leader or a friend—is not the answer here (even if the film suggests it is). But to keep things hidden seems worse.

Spiritual Elements

While it’s possible that Adam’s interactions with the ghosts in this story are all a product of his fever-stricken imagination, it’s also possible that Adam’s visits are quite real. If so, that possibility would come with plenty of unanswered spiritual ramifications.

Adam’s parents know that they’re dead, but they’re unsure of the particulars of how. And they’re not always together—as if one had an appointment to keep in the afterlife.

Adam’s family seems nominally Christian. In one trip into the past, he’s able to relive a Christmas he spent with his mom and dad. Adam remembers that they had fish and chips every Friday night, “So my mom could pretend she was still Catholic.”

Sexual Content

While Adam may have rejected Harry initially, Adam soon pays a visit to his sixth-floor neighbor. (Harry, somewhat shyly, asks Adam if he’s “queer,” just to make sure.) Shortly thereafter, the two become lovers. Indeed, All of Us Strangers is just as much about Adam and Harry’s homosexual romance as it is about Adam’s relationship with his parents.

While the most private of parts are kept from the camera, little else avoids its gaze. We see a bit of bum and sometimes an exposed side. Adam and Harry are pictured in various intimate encounters, sometimes tender, sometimes erotic. And when we see them together at a gay nightclub, the atmosphere feels tawdry—even threatening. (We see other same-sex couples make out, including in the bathroom.) After a physical/emotional crisis, Adam finds himself in a bathtub, likely naked (though we don’t see anything), with Harry tending to him.

Adam’s parents engage in lightly romantic interactions during Adam’s visits, though Adam recalls it wasn’t all wonderful at home. “They fought, and they bickered, and they pretended they were ruining each other’s lives,” he says.

Adam’s mother—before she learns that Adam is gay—tries to interrogate him about any possible girlfriends. (It’s then that Adam comes clean with his sexual preferences.) During Adam’s first post-death interaction with his father, his dad uses a derogatory slur for homosexuals—and we learn that his dad often joked about and ridiculed members of the LGBT community when Adam was growing up. He expresses deep regret and shame over his past behavior, though he does jokingly say, “I always knew you were a bit tooty fruity”

Violent Content

Adam’s father and mother died, we eventually learn, in a horrific car crash. His dad was killed more or less instantly, but his mother lingered for a few days. Adam tells Harry about what his mother looked and sounded like after the crash (in somewhat grotesque detail). But when his own parents ask about the crash (which they apparently don’t remember), Adam lies and tells them they both died instantly.

Adam has some sort of weird, metaphysical crisis on the London transit system. While not exactly violent, it is pretty disturbing.

When Adam takes Harry to meet his dead parents, they don’t answer the door. Adam breaks a window in an effort to force his way in.

[Spoiler Warning] This is a big one, so we’re giving this line just a bit of space before we get into the specifics. OK: Here we go: Adam learns that Harry is also dead. He apparently killed himself shortly after his first meeting with Adam. Adam discovers Harry’s bloated, slowly decaying corpse in Harry’s apartment. (And viewers see plenty of the corpse, as well.)

Crude or Profane Language

Nearly a dozen f-words and a number of other profanities, including three uses each of the s-word and the British profanity “bloody.” We hear “crap” and “h—” as well, in addition to three misuses of God’s name and seven abuses of Jesus’ name.

Drug and Alcohol Content

When Adam first meets Harry, the latter has obviously had too much to drink: He takes swigs from a bottle while riding an elevator, and he carries the same bottle of booze as he talks outside Adam’s door—asking Adam to let him in so they can share a drink.

Later, when offered beer, vodka or marijuana, Harry tells Adam that he’s “off alcohol” for a while, and that “weed’s bad.” But the two of them down shots and use other drugs, especially during a night on the town.

Characters smoke cigarettes.

Other Negative Elements

None.

Conclusion

While Adam and his father reminisce about Adam’s childhood, the father remembers that Adam often used to cry in his room. He would hear him from the other side of the closed door and walk on by. Adam asks why he never came in—never knocked, never asked what was wrong. The father says he thought that maybe Adam wanted to be alone. But it was more, of course: fear. If he opened that door, who knows how many doors might open after that.

Tearfully, Adam’s dad draws Adam in for a hug. “I’m so sorry I never came into your room when you were crying,” he says.

Adam is granted a moment of closure that so many of us—perhaps all of us—long for on some level. A chance to ask questions. A chance to apologize. A chance to connect with someone we love when it’s hard and painful and, all too often, too late. And it’s in moments like these that All of Us Strangers feels both true and universal.

But other moments shut the door and keep us on the other side.

All of Us Strangers works, and works beautifully, when it leans into its fantastical family drama side. I know many a former child who cried quietly behind a door, hoping someone would come in. I know many a parent who dared not enter. Evangelical Christians are not inoculated from these moments—children silently suffering with secrets of all stripes, parents feeling helpless and at a loss to know how to help, what to do.

But All of Us Strangers is unequivocal in how we should respond, at least, to the question of our children’s sexual identity: Accept it. Embrace it. Exult in it. And yet, the Bible is equally unequivocal in how it views sex outside the bounds of heterosexual marriage. That leaves us at an impasse.

Moreover, All of Us Strangers also leans heavily into its erotically charged gay romance. That can make it a discomforting viewing experience, and it’ll inherently push many—both Christian and secular moviegoers—away. This isn’t for me, they’ll say. I’m not interested.

We can leave it there. We can close the door on this film and walk on by.

But if we reject the movie, let’s not be so quick to dismiss the humanity and heart we find here: the longing to be known. To be loved.

On some level, we are strangers to one another. We play our parts at work and home. We are honest and transparent and loving and ourselves … and yet, for all our efforts and intentions, dark corners hide in each of us. Corners we’re afraid to introduce to anyone, perhaps even ourselves.

We’re broken, each of us. We weep in our rooms. And only our good and loving Lord dares to fully enter.