Without ever knowing ourselves: between melodrama and fantasy, a heartbreaking work (critic)

A great film about love, loss, homosexuality and loneliness that tugs at your heart while avoiding any sentimentality. Andrew Haigh at his best.

It’s a film that grabs you in a handful of shots, instantly creating empathy with its main character, whose deep, buried pain jumps into your face and that the story will work to bring to the surface to treat it and why not cure it. . An empathy that makes us ready to accept each twist and turn of the fantasy-filled adventure that Andrew Haigh offers in this adaptation of Strangers by Taichi Yamada. Starting with this principle of back and forth between today and the 80s which will constitute its backbone in a gesture where ghost film and melodrama become one.

These journeys through time are those made by Adam (Andrew Scott, masterful) living in a tower block in London that most of its inhabitants seem to have deserted, with the exception of a mysterious neighbor (Paul Mescal, impressive in his way of occupying space while disappearing) with whom he will begin an affair. And who, haunted by memories of his past, returns to the suburbs where he grew up to discover that his parents, who died 30 years ago in an accident… still occupy the place, allowing him a discussion with them that he could never have. He who was only 12 years old when they disappeared.

This porosity between the real and the supernatural opens up the field of possibilities for a feature film impossible to reduce to a single genre, all at once a family chronicle, a variation around mourning, a great love film and a powerfully political work around homosexuality and the deep loneliness that you can experience as a queer child and which never leaves you. Haigh lets the viewer pull their own thread to experience the story in their own way.

But his extreme sensitivity already at work in Weekend, 45 years old And The Wild Road allows him to achieve a tour de force here: a warm work around a trauma, devoid of any sentimentality, populated with pop songs with a heartbreaking emergence (from The Power of Love has Always on my mind), casting a spell on the archetypes (here it is the mother – played by a demented Claire Foy – and not Adam’s father who has difficulty accepting his homosexuality). We come away with a heavy heart but with an immediate desire to see it again and the certainty that each viewing will be a different experience.

By Andrew Haigh. With Paul Mescal, Andrew Scott, Claire Foy… Duration 1h45. Released February 14, 2024