Forty-something Adam (played by Andrew Scott) sits at his desk, trying to write a script for a film based on his own difficult teenage experiences. He can’t do it at all, so he moves to the couch, where he half-heartedly watches TV. He falls asleep. He wakes up in the evening and eats the remains of the ordered food of questionable freshness. He looks out the window of his high-story apartment at London, which never sleeps. But she does not participate in his life, she is not part of it. When the fire alarm rings, he goes downstairs but no one else is there, as if no one lives there. However, when he looks up, he sees the light on and the figure of a man in the window. This man, Harry (Paul Mescal), visits him a moment later with a bottle of whiskey, most of which he has already drunk, openly offering sex or at least company. Harry insists because he says there are vampires at his door. But Adam refuses.
When talking about vampires, Harry probably unconsciously quotes the words of the song “The Power of Love” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which will be the main theme of the film. These first scenes of “Good Strangers” well reflect what both characters are struggling with – they are terribly lonely, but each, as it turns out, for a different reason. Depressed, Adam suffers from unhealed wounds after the loss of his parents, to whom he did not have time to tell that he is gay. In order to be able to describe his experiences in the script, he must work through mourning, make a kind of coming-out and close this chapter of his youth. So he decides to visit his family home. When he gets there, he is greeted by his parents – just as he remembered them when he was 12 years old and last saw them.
Searchlight Pictures, 20th Century Studios / Press materials Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal in “Good Strangers”
Thanks to meetings with his parents – because there will be more of them – Adam slowly opens up to his relationship with Harry, who, despite the generation difference, also feels alienated as a gay man. Adam still vividly remembers the 1980s and their homophobia, stigmatization, exclusion and, above all, the fear of AIDS. These memories, combined with ridicule and rejection at school, cast a shadow over his relationships with men. Harry, on the other hand, growing up in seemingly better times, is considered the black sheep of the family. “Both characters are lonely not because they are gay, but because the world made them feel that they are different,” explained the director in an interview with the Guardian, for whom it is a very personal film: the photos in Adam’s family home were shot in the house where he himself lived as a child.
The personality of this story is clearly visible here. But Haigh is also a master of building intimacy between characters, which he has already proven in his earlier films: “45 Years” and “A Completely Different Weekend”. However, while there it resulted from well-written characters, in “Good Strangers” this intimacy was created mainly thanks to the actors: Scott and Mescal reach the heights of their abilities, making believable an unreal story that, as the plot progresses, increasingly escapes logic – it is what is true and what is imagination becomes the viewer’s decision. Adam and Harry seem more like embodiments of certain attitudes and experiences and less like flesh-and-blood people, which is why their chemistry suffers. Adam, with his trauma, was burdened by the director with being a representative of the entire generation of gays who grew up in the 1980s – this is indicated by the English title of the film: “All of Us Strangers”, literally “all of us, strangers”.
“It wasn’t an easy time. Growing up, I felt that if I was gay, I wouldn’t have a future. And the alternative was not being gay, which I couldn’t do. So I wanted to tell this story,” Haigh told the Guardian. In another article, the newspaper collected statements from queer writers similar in age to the director. Some of them found their experiences in this story, but others rejected it, calling it “awkward and full of clichés about gay life” as well as “a theatrical sketch with invented pain and alienation.” Unfortunately, it’s hard not to see a bit of truth in these words of criticism. Haigh touches on the trauma of the 1980s quite superficially: Adam’s parents, partially responsible for his alienation, say exactly what we expect from clichéd portraits of ignorant people of that time, and the horror of AIDS does not ring out as it should, it appears as if in passing.
Searchlight Pictures, 20th Century Studios / Press materials Paul Mescal in “Good Strangers”
Haigh also uses every opportunity to make us cry. While the film’s visuals are captivating, especially how seamlessly they combine realism and imagination, the way Haigh uses them to build the characters’ sense of alienation borders on overkill. The director managed to create some of the saddest cinematic characters, and their loneliness is so overwhelming that it is hard not to say that life has a little more color after all. Frankie Goes to Hollywood doesn’t help either, although it must be admitted that the soundtrack is a beautiful, nostalgic tribute to the music of the 80s, which was sometimes the only salvation for alienated souls.
Despite its flaws, “Good Strangers” is not a film you can easily dismiss – on the contrary, you think about it long after you leave the theater. Because there is a hidden truth in it that everyone knows, there are feelings that everyone can identify with, there is emotion that is hard to resist. Therefore, the question whether it is a great film or a great abuse remains open. But perhaps this balancing act is the most interesting thing in cinema.