A tear-jerking drama that really resonates, Andrew Haigh’s latest film, All Of Us Strangers, is his most successful yet. Loosely adapted from Japanese novelist Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, Haigh has fashioned a deeply personal film with fantastic performances. Andrew Scott, restrained and contained, plays Adam, a writer who lives in a near-empty tower block: the only other person who seems to live there, in fact, is Paul Mescal’s younger Harry, with whom he eventually falls in love. Their chemistry is palpable, their scenes tender and believable.

Coupled with this romance, however, is a big, ambitious narrative swing in All Of Us Strangers: Adam returns to his family home where he finds his long-dead parents, played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy. They were killed in a car crash before he was able to come out to them; over the course of his visits, he tells them of his life now, his gay identity and the emptiness he seems to feel.

Foy and Bell are excellent as the concerned – if often out of modern step–parents, with their 1980s attitudes to homosexuality, but it is this narrative device that emotionally devastates. Now the same age as his parents, if not slightly older, adult Adam can talk frankly to them about life and their relationship with each other.

Scott is heartbreaking as this lost man still trying to fill the hole the grief has made and how his life as a gay man has been shaped. Mescal’s younger Harry has not had the same issues to deal with in more recent years, but Scott carries the stigma of what it felt like to grow up gay in the 1980s.

Supernatural but without frills or complex time travel explanations, and filmed in writer/director Haigh’s own childhood home, this deeply personal film will leave you a sobbing wreck. Human and hopeful with universal truths, All Of Us Strangers is a British classic in the making.

Dir: Andrew Haigh (15, 105 mins)

All Of Us Strangers is in cinemas from Fri 26 Jan

words KEIRON SELF