105 min | R | December 22, 2023 | Searchlight Pictures
Adam lives alone in a near-empty London tower until a neighbor knocks and his dead parents turn up alive in the suburbs. Andrew Haigh turns a ghost story into the conversation a gay man never got to have with his mom and dad. It is grief with the lights left on.
Adam is a screenwriter who lives almost alone in a half-empty glass tower in London. He meets Harry, a younger man from a lower floor, and a relationship starts. Then Adam travels back to the suburban house where he grew up and finds his parents alive, frozen at the age they were when they died decades ago. Andrew Haigh builds a ghost story that is really a film about grief and the conversations a gay man never got to have with the people who raised him. The supernatural premise is a delivery system for everything the living leave unsaid.
Andrew Scott plays Adam as a man held together by routine and politeness. He keeps his pain so contained that the moments it leaks out land like a rupture. Paul Mescal plays Harry with a boozy, needy warmth that masks his own isolation. The two actors build intimacy out of small gestures and long silences rather than declarations. Jamie Bell plays Dad and Claire Foy plays Mum as parents stuck in the manners and limits of the era they died in. Foy in particular plays a mother whose tenderness and dated prejudice arrive in the same sentence.
Andrew Haigh directs and adapts the screenplay from Taichi Yamada’s novel “Strangers.” He shoots Adam through glass and reflections so often that the man seems to live behind a window onto his own life. The childhood house glows in warm amber light while the tower block stays cold and blue. Haigh edits with slow dissolves that fold the past into the present until the seams disappear. The period pop on the soundtrack does the emotional work of memory, pulling Adam back to a specific moment he cannot leave.
This is a film about the people we lose and the versions of ourselves we lose with them. Adam goes home to grieve and ends up trying to finish a conversation that death cut short. Haigh refuses easy comfort and lets the grief stay heavy on the frame. The result is a precise study of loneliness that earns every quiet devastation it delivers. Few films treat the dead with this much tenderness and this little sentimentality.