Associated Press
[Source: AP]
Andrew Haigh began getting a sense of the knockout power of his new film, “All of Us Strangers,” a few days after it premiered at the Telluride Film Festival.
“I’d run into people who had seen the film three days before. I’d be talking to them and they’d just start crying,” Haigh says, laughing. “And I’m sort of both apologetic and quite glad that it shook them to their core.”
Haigh, the 50-year-old British filmmaker of “45 Years” and “Lean on Pete,” is accustomed to strong responses from his films. His 2011 breakthrough, “Weekend,” about a tender but brief romance, is considered a landmark of queer cinema.
“That that film has had an effect will probably always be the thing that I’m most proud of,” Haigh said in an interview earlier this fall when “All of Us Strangers” was playing at the New York Film Festival.
Yet Haigh’s latest, which opens in limited release Friday, may be his most shattering. Andrew Scott stars as Adam, a lonely screenwriter who, while toiling on a script, is transported back to his childhood home where he finds his long-dead parents (Claire Foy, Jamie Bell) as they were when Adam was 12. At the same time, Adam is hesitantly exploring a relationship with a neighbor named Henry (Paul Mescal).
The result is something magical and mournful that draws profound connections between familial love and romantic love, between gay life and estrangement, and between a pair of strangers nursing shared wounds. For Haigh, who shot the childhood scenes in the home he grew up in, it was also highly personal.
“I was entering my past as Adam was entering his,” Haigh says. “The whole process felt like a slightly expensive therapy session.”
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