Thelma and Louise [1991] - I continue to love some cinema where everyone is hot and completely fucking miserable.

Anatomy of a Fall [2023] - Thorny and very well executed without being massively revolutionary. French court seems WILD.

Rotting In The Sun [2023] - Fascinated by this weird meta look into the life of creatively minded gayguys

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A Very English Loneliness

Adam opens YouTube again. It already knows what to recommend to him. It already knows where he's going. Tiny LEDs try their best to replicate the warm blurs of cathode rays), the speaker imitates its grandmother's rattling wheeze. The lights dance and fill the creases on their viewer's face with blues and golds, filling those sad eyes with an echo of a glimmer. Soon enough he'll be asleep, colours dancing across his heaving chest, soothed by the sermon for an aching soul.

It would be easy to understand Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers as some abstract trauma-filled tearjerker, a symbol of some fundamental tragedy within the gayguy experience. The marketing certainly won't tell you otherwise! There's also the sometimes wooden dialogue and arguably hokey needle drops. But to corral the film into simple misery dulls the thorniness and political positioning of the text here.

Adam (Andrew Scott) lives in a flat he owns in one of the many paint-by-numbers new build blocks that tower over Black and working-class areas (in this case, somewhere in South London), giant property portfolios divorced from the people that surround them. He and Harry (Paul Mescal) are the only ones who live there as far as he knows. It’s a depressing image, but it’s also this is what it means to be “accepted” into British society.

In England, there have pretty much always been some allowances made for homosexual behaviour in the upper classes so long as it didn't cause a scandal and wasn't linked to any aspirations of liberation. In practice, this meant that spaces like Oxford and Cambridge became havens for young upper-class queer men, such as members of the Bright Young Things.  This was also true of the colonies, where subjects could be engaged (and usually exploited) outside of the direct eye of British high society - perhaps most notably this was the case with TE Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia).

What's different about our contemporary time is that the deal has been extended to people beyond the landed gentry and the terms were made more favourable. You can get married (and more importantly have the legal rights that come with it. You can be openly gay without being outright fired by your employer (so long as you can navigate a hostile legal system). You can be on television and in soap operas (as long as you can cope with endless harassment). You can hold political office (as long as you tow the party line). You could even have children (as long as you’re willing to jump through hoops). 

This deal is not without concessions. It requires the gay man; as distinct from the fairy, the faggot, the poof, the crossdresser, who are still constantly in the cross-hairs; to assimilate himself into the political beliefs and objectives of British society. Out with the Railton Road squat and in with the property ladder, out with the radical community and in with the Thatcherite atomised unit. The dynamic here is very clearly at play when gay men like Dan Wootton position themselves against the trans people who they should ostensibly be in community with. 

This deal is reflected in Haigh’s characters. Each of these leading men looks for salvation within the nuclear family structures understood as “real” by a country where Thatcherism won. Harry pursues somewhat older Adam, finding a mentor and lover in one. Adam dreams about his parents so hard that he manifests their reappearance - exactly the same as the last time he saw them. 

There's a persistent implied psychosexuality to all of this throughout that I wish Haigh pushed further in his filmmaking - but is still present and essential. When Scott first notices Jamie Bell (playing his dad) in a local park and follows him, Haigh frames it in a way that makes it look like they're cruising. When Scott is kissed goodnight or sleeps between Claire Foye (Mum) and Bell wearing pyjamas that don't fit him anymore, his performance feels very childlike but there's also an undeniably strange borderline-sexual vibe given all the actors being of similar ages.

The uncomfortable blurring of lines here feels very intentional. Haigh is refusing to let these feelings of longing be clean or easy. Even with Adam getting what he dreams of, his father apologising for being emotionally distant, a world where his parents don't go on the drive that ends with them dead, it's not totally Correct. Instead, it’s a funhouse mirror that’s just a little too uncanny to be defined in a single emotion. 

When we reach the back end of the film that message gets an even sharper bite. I think a more cowardly filmmaker would let this film end very differently but Haigh refuses to let monogamous love and connections with biofamily suddenly be the panacea that Adam is desperate for it to be. The power of love is at the centre of this film, but that gnawing hole of love is not one that can be filled by the guidelines prescribed by the last decade or so of the status quo for gay men. To fix that requires community and connection - a love that goes far beyond blood, wedding bands and white picket fences.

I don't think Haigh fully succeeds with this film. It’s overlong, some of the writing falls flat, and he doesn’t lean into the horror nearly as hard as I’d like. But if there’s one thing the director is good at doing, it’s capturing the emotional truth of a specific English gayguy experience and in his specificity he cuts closer to the core of the issue than his contemporaries or his imitators. The thrum of yearning that rises into a scream tells us, even if Haigh cannot fully articulate it, that assimilating gayness into bourgeoise Englishness is a mission that only ends in misery for those few who can even access it. We have to fight for something better. 

Adam opens YouTube again. It already knows what to recommend to him. It already knows where he's going. Tiny LEDs try their best to replicate the warm blurs of cathode rays), the speaker imitates its grandmother's rattling wheeze. The lights dance and fill the creases on their viewer's face with blues and golds, filling those sad eyes with an echo of a glimmer. Soon enough he'll be asleep, colours dancing across his heaving chest, soothed by the sermon for an aching soul.