Strangers, the review of the film: a story of love and ghosts, but told with detachment

In 2011, the British director Andrew Haigh told the story of a young homosexual who lives in an anonymous building and is looking for some kind of human connection. That film, Weekendit's a modern gay classic, full of digressions, melancholic and disturbing. Twelve years later, Haigh returns to a building (in this case, an eerily empty London luxury apartment block) for his new film Strangerswhich premiered at the Telluride Film Festival.

In that building lives a man, Adam (Andrew Scott, of few words but effective), bored and inconclusive middle-aged homosexual. He is a screenwriter who struggles to start a project about his family, but who mostly spends his time watching television and staying up late munching on snacks. One day, as also happened in Weekenda chance encounter brings Adam into close contact with a handsome stranger, Harry (a Paul Mescal with shabby charm), who appears to be the only other tenant in this shiny new building. While their flirtation evolves in a sexual and romantic way, Adam also takes a journey into the past. In a certain sense, very literally: when he visits his childhood home, perhaps in search of inspiration, Adam in fact finds his parents there, young as they were at the time of their disappearance in a car accident – ​​perhaps the first and more significantly confirms that Adam's was destined to be a solitary life.

Strangers it is a ghost story, at times scary, but otherwise centered on the loving and rigorous language of mourning. Adam's parents, sensitively played by Claire Foy And Jamie Bell, they seem to have never stopped waiting for their son to come home; they know nothing about his life and are eager to know how he grew up. Just as Harry, back in the quiet of Adam's apartment, peppers him with questions whose answers contribute to completing the portrait of a man adrift in solitude, an orphan who, at a certain point in adulthood, seems to have still lost once the socket.

This is a common feeling among middle-aged people, but perhaps especially (at least according to Haigh) for homosexuals, whose very existence can isolate them from the serenely accepted models and rhythms of the “normal” world. Being gay no longer implies one solitary life, Adam repeats to his mother when she insinuates it. Not like it used to, at least. However, when he says it we don't really believe him: and he doesn't seem to believe it either. Strangerswith that title as evocative as it is stigmatizing, speaks of alienation, perhaps typical of Haigh's homosexual male peers who grew up on an identity fault line, while a new progressivism, a new tolerance and a new openness attempted to free them from the horrors of the past.

Did Adam fall into that crack? Not exactly. But she hangs on it, and is happy that Harry's hand is pulling him, even if briefly, towards the light of contentment and self-acceptance. Yet, she cannot get over the mourning for her parents nor, in some ways, for the life they had hoped for him: the quiet of heterosexual marriage, children and houses with gardens. Because of that inevitability Adam has lost more than one friend, which perhaps partly explains his rather empty existence in the city.

As he wonders about these losses (both Adam's specific tragedy and a more ineffable desolation) Strangers it wanders to the point of abstraction. Haigh's film whispers of mystery: the fact that Adam's parents have suddenly returned is not the only disturbing unknown in the film. While the strident soundtrack of Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch rattles, murmurs and buzzes, the dream fades into reality. On the other hand, the film's sumptuous cinematography disharmonically counterbalances that disturbing soundscape as well as the harshness of Haigh's ideas (the film is loosely based on the novel Strangers Of Taichi Yamadawhile the gay theme is Haigh's own work).

The impact of Strangers it will probably be very different depending on the viewer. With such a desperate thesis, the film risks being completely alien to many younger queer people who, while undoubtedly continuing to suffer the blows of an often hostile world, certainly cannot identify with Adam's internal struggle (fear, veiled modesty, impenetrable desire). Older viewers might instead dive headlong into the despondency of the film, finding comfort, or even a catharsisin his obsessive pain.

It is a difficult work, touching but cold and discontinuous. The same goes for Haigh's 2015 film, 45 Years, where a long and mostly happy marriage had to be reconsidered when something like a ghost emerged from the past. While attempting to evoke deep feelings, that film was instead a rather clinical study of human thought and behavior. Strangers it tastes equally aseptic. For all the sharp insights, sensational performances, steamy sex and devastating conclusions, the film delivers detached, as if observing the scene from behind a sheet of glass. Maybe it's because Haigh offers Adam very few opportunities to anchor himself in reality, but much of the film is lost in a sad reverie. Strangers it is itself a sort of specter, looming and frighteningly obstinate yet incorporeal, impossible to truly embrace and hold tightly as if one's life depended on it.