Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal lead a hauntingly poignant meditation on grief.

Some films slip into the soul so quietly that you only realise their full weight when the credits are rolling, and All of Us Strangers is one of them. Andrew Haigh has crafted something extraordinary – a film that exists in the liminal space between memory and presence, the living and the dead, the past and the ever-slipping present. Adapted from Taichi Yamada’s Strangers, Haigh’s version isn’t just a meditation on loss – it’s a study of grief, longing, and the way love lingers in the places we expect it to have disappeared.

Adam (Andrew Scott) moves through life with a quiet solitude, his London flat a space of stillness that feels almost suspended in time. Then, an encounter with the enigmatic and equally adrift Harry (Paul Mescal) shifts the air. But what makes the film so haunting – beyond its love story – is how it plays with the boundaries of reality. Scott’s performance is astonishingly open, his face a map of unresolved sorrow and hesitant hope. He doesn’t just inhabit Adam; he wears his ache in every glance, every silence. Mescal, in a role that feels like an echo of Aftersun‘s spectral sadness, is magnetic in his vulnerability, his presence a tether to something apparently real in Adam’s unsteady world.

Haigh takes the bare bones of Yamada’s novel and reshapes them with his own sensibilities. The source material, originally set in Japan, leans into eerie unease and supernatural confrontation. Haigh, however, internalises the sense of haunting. His characters aren’t visited by traditional spectres, nor does he rely on horror’s usual mechanics. Instead, the film manifests memory in ways that feel both tangible and elusive, lingering not to terrify but to ask questions: What happens to love that is left unresolved? How do we live alongside the past without letting it consume us?

The film’s aesthetic reflects its emotional landscape – half-lit spaces, reflections that suggest something more than one reality at play, a London that feels eerily emptied of distractions. It is intimate, quiet, and all the more devastating for it. The film doesn’t demand an answer to its mysteries, nor does it force its characters to arrive at neat resolutions. Instead, it embraces the ambiguity of feeling, allowing its emotions to settle like dust in the light.

For those unfamiliar with the novel, All of Us Strangers will likely feel like an original piece of work – its quiet devastation and aching tenderness making it one of the most haunting films in years. For those who have read Strangers, it’s a fascinating evolution of the story’s themes, trading traditional horror for something even more unsettling: the realisation that our past never truly leaves us, and sometimes, that’s the most beautiful tragedy of all.