From the first look between Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Paul Mescal) in All of Us Strangers, the sexual tension is palpable. “I never had any doubt that the chemistry would be there,” says writer and director Andrew Haigh. “People always want to talk about the sex, I’ve experienced it the whole of my career.”
For his latest movie, Haigh reimagines Taichi Yamada’s Japanese ghost story Strangers through a queer lens. Protagonists Adam and Harry meet in London and bond over a shared loneliness: both feel alienated and like outsiders. Their meeting coincides with Adam’s visit to his childhood home – a space where he encounters his parents, who appear to be stuck in time, living just as they did before they died decades before.
Haigh uses this ghostly premise as a means of broaching the memories and experiences which continue to haunt queer people, particularly those who came of age when being LGBTQIA+ carried greater stigma. “I think any gay person of a certain age when they watch the film can say, ‘Yes, I remember what it was like to be in that time',” he says, “In the 80s and into the 90s, you
