All Of The Strangers has just been released, and if you’ve watched it, then I’m sure you’ve got the same reaction as me, just wow. I was blown away by how it made me feel whilst watching it and the lasting effect that it had on me when the credits started rolling.
Focusing on a man named Adam who was a writer that was writing about his mother and father, the film took us on a journey where he wrote about them but also discovered his love for somebody called Harry.
With A twist early on and a massive twist at the end with a heartbreakingly beautiful meaning within it, let’s jump into the film and break it down.
Movie Explained
This film was all about grief, loneliness being pushed to the edge, the inability to move on, and the different ways that people feel about certain situations.
All throughout the film, we saw Adam writing about his parents, and we actually saw him revisiting them within his mind and then reliving the timeline of being with them when he was younger, but in his adult form.
So they were seeing him as he was now, a man in his 40s, and he was telling them all about his life and the person that he became. Something that they never got to see due to them dying before he was 12 years old in a car accident around Christmas.
We saw the difference in the way that people’s views were in the 80s compared to how it was in the present day, and the difference in opinion and the friction with certain things, such as Adam revealing to his mother that he was gay and his mother not quite knowing how to react to it. Especially due to the world being less accepting of people who were gay 40 years ago.
This was also paired with the underlying issues that he had with his parents when he was younger, which were never addressed before they died.
Adam had never been able to properly move on from his parent’s deaths, and I think that was something that stemmed from him not being able to say goodbye to them when they died.
They went out when he was in bed, and they died during the night on the road, even when his mother was in hospital, he didn’t get to say goodbye to her due to his grandmother thinking that it would be too scarring for him.
So within this film, we saw them learning all about him, conversing about the type of person that he became, expressing just how proud they were of him, along with apologies being said on both parts for the way that times were.
For example, the fact that Adam’s dad was never properly there for him when he needed him to just simply wrap his arms around him. Yet we got to see that in the present day.
His mother was also not the mother of the year and told him how proud she was of him. Yet we were seeing them say that to him as we were watching it. Right up until the point where he got to say goodbye to them.
Adam Says His Good Byes
They went to a shopping mall and an American diner, a place that he would go to with them when they were younger.
We saw his father say goodbye to him and tell him that he loved him first because he was the first to die in a car accident. Then he got to his mother, who lost her vision and couldn’t see Adam due to her losing an eye in the accident, and then he said goodbye to her as well.
Both of his parents asked if it was quick when they died, and we saw Adam lie to his mother and say that it was even though she was fighting for a few days, woke up, and then died shortly after.
Showing that even though he was the child in this relationship, he was acting like the parent as he was now older than them and protecting them from the harsh truth of what happened.
This was almost like when you say, “I wish I could show them what I became or tell them that I loved them one last time”. It was those sayings but depicted in a film, and it was heartbreaking yet amazing to watch.
We saw that Adam got addicted to visiting his parents, as one would after not seeing them for most of your life, to the point where they had to go for good, and he had to let them go because it was becoming all consuming of him living in the past, holding on to the grief and not being able to move on.
So him actually getting to say goodbye to them in the diner in the present day was his way of being able to move on. And it allowed him to start to properly process the grief that had consumed most of his life and led him to just being on his own. Because he’d never properly been able to move on from it.
Adam And Harry
Alongside this story, we had the character Harry, who we were introduced to early on in the film as he lived in the same building as Adam. On the night that the film opened on, he knocked on Adam’s door and asked if he could have a drink with him, or if he could come in.
On that night, Adam said no, but we saw that the next day Adam spoke to Harry in the elevator, and from there, they formed a relationship with their loneliness and the fact that at some point in their lives, they felt like an outsider actually brought them together.
We heard about how Harry’s family wasn’t that accepting of the fact that he was gay, which meant that he didn’t really speak to them and that they pushed him to the edge. The edge of life, where he was quite literally on his own and had nobody.
There was always this ominous feeling about the character Harry, as it just seemed to appear and vanish at points. Plus we only ever saw the both of them together, mainly inside of Adam’s apartment. But it was at the end of the film that we found out why.
All Of Us Strangers Ending Explained
When Adam went down to floor six, we saw him knock on Harry’s door, but there was no answer.
So he went in and it was there where we saw Harry’s body on the bed wearing the same clothes as he was wearing on the first night when the film opened, holding the bottle of whiskey that we saw.
Showing that Harry was, in fact, dead and had been this whole time. Adam had been seeing him like he’d been seeing his parents.
The night when Adam declined, to let Harry in, Harry went back to his apartment and then did things for himself because he was so lonely.
What was so powerful about this was that if Adam hadn’t said NO on that night, then Harry would have most likely still be alive. What was even more powerful about this was the fact that Harry’s body hadn’t been found by anybody, not his parents, his siblings, nobody at all.
Reinforcing the fact that he had nobody in his life who truly cared about him up until the point where he died, where he found Adam, it was such a sad moment.
With Adam cradling Harry in his apartment on his bed as Harry faded away and said goodbye, the camera zoomed out and Harry illuminated and turned into a bright star.
As this was happening, the song The Power of Love played just like it did in the opening part of the film in an old rerun of Top of the Pops. And it hit home the power that love does actually have, that it provides so much to people, and that it can often be taken for granted.
Review
I thought this movie was incredible. I’ve not felt the way that I’ve felt in this cinema when watching a film for such a long time. From the beautiful transitions to the perfectly chosen soundtrack, even down to the tiniest of details within the dialogue and the way that it was written, the film just felt real.
You felt the loneliness that was present within Adam and the fact that he’d never properly been able to move on from the death of his parents, even though it happened decades ago.
A line that I thought was beautiful, which kind of summed up the tone of the film, was when Harry said, “I’m really sorry” to Adam when he said how his parents died.
Adam then responded by saying, “ohh it doesn’t matter, it was a long time ago” and Harry said, “I don’t think that actually matters”.
Showing that the loss of a parent is something that sticks with somebody for their entire life and that no matter how much time passes, the emptiness and loneliness that is there will be there forever.
