All of Us Strangers, and the Mother Who Loves Him in the Words of Her Own Time

The woman in the kitchen is making her son something to eat, and she is younger than he is.

He is in his forties, a screenwriter who lives alone in a new tower block in London where he seems to have only one neighbour. She has been dead for about thirty years. She and his father were killed in a car crash just before his twelfth birthday, and here, in the suburban house he grew up in, the two of them are going on exactly as they were: the same wallpaper, the same records, the same young faces. She makes him take off his wet clothes. She looks him up and down and tells him that he was just a boy, and now he is not. Then she asks whether he has a girlfriend.

He tells her he is gay.

The scene, from Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, lasts a few minutes, and most of what the film has to say about being seen by a parent is already in it. Her first answer is a question. Then her fears arrive, one after another, in the words of the years she lived in. He is not asking her permission; he has known who he is for a long time. What he is asking for is harder to name, and the rest of the film is spent naming it.

This essay discusses the whole film, including its ending, which changes how much of what comes before it reads. If you would rather meet the film unwarned, this is the place to stop.

The story began with a wish. The Japanese novel it adapts was written, by its author’s own account as his daughter has reported it, out of a longing for parents who would take a grown son whole, the good in him and the bad together. Haigh keeps the wish and refuses its easiest part. This mother cannot take her son whole, not at first. She answers him with love and with fear in the same sentence, and the film will not correct her into a better mother. What it finds, this essay argues, is that being seen by a parent was never the same as being approved of. It is being looked at by someone who is still herself, fears and all, and who stays at the table. And at the very end the film turns the look around. The son is the only one left who knows how his mother died, and he decides that she need not know.

All of Us Strangers was written and directed by Andrew Haigh, and is loosely based on Taichi Yamada’s novel of 1987, published in English in 2003 as Strangers. The novel had been filmed once before, in Japan, by Nobuhiko Obayashi in 1988. Andrew Scott plays Adam; Paul Mescal plays Harry, his neighbour; Claire Foy and Jamie Bell play his parents. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on 31 August 2023, opened in British cinemas on 26 January 2024, and reached Japan on 19 April 2024.

It won seven British Independent Film Awards, including Best British Independent Film, and was nominated for six BAFTAs, among them Claire Foy as best supporting actress. At the end of 2024 The Guardian placed it first among the year’s films released in the United Kingdom.

Three deaths belong to the story: Adam’s parents, in a car crash, and one more that the ending reveals. Each is stated plainly here, and none is described.

Adam’s life, when we meet him, is very quiet. The tower block is new and nearly empty. One night a neighbour knocks: Harry, younger, drunk, holding a bottle of whisky and asking to come in. Adam, unsettled, sends him away. He is trying to write something about his childhood and getting nowhere, so he takes a train out to the suburb where he grew up, walks to the house, and finds his parents living in it.

The house is a real one. It is the house Haigh grew up in, just outside Croydon, which he had not been back to in forty years; the man living there when the crew arrived had not redecorated for thirty. Nothing about the parents is explained. They are as they were on the day they died, which means that, now, they are younger than their son. Haigh has said this was what drew him to the novel: the thought of meeting your parents again long after they were gone, “only now they’re the same age as you.” The casting makes the arithmetic visible. Jamie Bell, who plays the father, is ten years younger than Andrew Scott, who plays the son.

Two small facts in the credits are worth holding on to. The parents have no names. They are listed as Mum and Dad, which is what they are to him and all the film ever calls them. And Claire Foy has said that she knew she was “playing her as how Adam remembered her.” In a credited cast of six, she is one of two women; the other is a waitress.

So there are two questions here, and they are not the same one. The first is whether a mother can see her son. The second, which the first makes it easy to forget, is whose eyes we are seeing her through.

Taichi Yamada, born in Asakusa in 1934, was one of Japan’s best-known television dramatists. He wrote this novel at fifty-three, and his daughter has said that no other work of his carried so much of him. Its hero is a television scriptwriter of about his own age, from Asakusa, whose parents were killed in a traffic accident when he was twelve. Yamada had lost his mother when he was ten.

His daughter, Saeko Hasegawa, has described what he told her. It was a hard stretch of his life. He had come to think that the parents of a fantasy might be the one presence that would take all of you, the good and the bad together. But nobody, he thought, would want to read about a middle-aged man who wanted to be babied by his mother and father. So he borrowed the power of fantasy and made them dead. Then, he thought, it might work.

That is the wish at the root of the story: to be received whole. Haigh keeps its shape and changes its price. In the film’s production notes he describes Adam as “aching to be known by them,” and in the next breath warns that “nostalgia can often hide a different truth, and his parents were a product of the time they lived.” To be received whole is a fantasy of acceptance. To be known is harder, because the people doing the knowing are still themselves.

The film gives Adam his parents back and lets them love him. What it will not give him is parents improved by the thirty years they missed.

The scene begins as an ordinary afternoon. Adam calls when his mother is at home on her own. She gives him something to eat and wants to hear about his life, and she asks, as a mother of her time would, whether there is a girlfriend, or a wife. He says he is gay.

“As in homosexual?” she asks. Then the fears come, one after another, and every one of them is dated. The illness that the news of her years had tied to men like him. Whether he will be set upon if people know, out “on the high street, at WH Smith.” That it is, she has heard, “a very lonely kind of life.” He tells her that a great deal has changed since she died, that men like him can marry now, and have children. She does not quite know what to do with that.

He answers the loneliness too, and it is the most exact line in the scene. He may be lonely, he tells her, but not because he is gay.

Claire Foy has talked about how she played it. She did not want her “modern sensibilities” to get in the way of the fact that “whilst everything she says is said dripping in love, he feels judged just by virtue of what she’s saying.” To make the mother say the right thing, she thought, would “short-change both the audience and the characters.” The scene ends without resolving. The mother does come round, but the film lets that happen out of sight.

Read it with care for both of them. He is a man in his forties who has known himself for years, and within a few sentences he is a boy again, waiting to see whether his family will stay with him once he has told them who he is; Andrew Scott has described exactly that hope. She is a woman who has been given a few minutes to take in thirty years of a life she was not there for, and, as Foy read it, every part of that life lands on her as a verdict on the kind of mother she was. Neither of them is wrong to feel what they feel. The scene is cruel to both of them, and the cruelty is not in either of them.

The easy reading is that the mother is prejudiced and the film is honest enough to show it. There is something in that. But it misses what the film is actually mourning in her.

Everyone else in this story got thirty years to change their minds. Laws changed. What could be shown on a screen changed. Her son grew up, moved away, came out, lived a life. She got none of those years. She died young, when her boy was eleven, and whoever she might have become stopped there. What we see in the kitchen is not who she was going to be. It is who she was allowed to be.

Foy has put this more plainly than any critic. “You can’t try and make her some sort of bigoted person,” she said, because if the mother “had had the opportunity to live now and be a grown-up, a woman in her 60s who has a son who identifies as gay, then I think she would be a very different woman and a very different mother. But she didn’t have that opportunity. It was something that she was denied because she died very young.”

That is what this film has to say about women on screen, and it is not borrowed from anywhere else. Its only real woman is a mother measured, at every turn, against her son’s life: whether she was there, whether she knew, whether she said the right thing. She is given no future in which to do better. And the film does something quietly unusual with her. In most stories of this kind, as Jamie Bell has pointed out, it is the father we imagine taking the news badly. Here the mother struggles and the father is surprisingly unbothered. The film gives the harder reaction to the woman, and then refuses to make her the villain for it.

She also saw something, and the film lets us notice it. On his first visit, before any of this, she told him he had always been a sensitive boy. She knew something about him before either of them had a word for it. That, too, is what being seen by a parent often looks like: an accurate glimpse without the language to hold it. A mother who noticed and could not name is not the same as a mother who never looked.

An essay in this Library, “Living Alone Is a Household Type, Not a Diagnosis”, opened with a daughter asking her mother, gently, whether she was lonely living on her own, and argued that the question folds three things into one: how a person lives, whether anyone checks in, and how the evenings actually feel. The mother in the kitchen makes the same fold from the other side, turning a way of living into a sentence of loneliness, and Adam’s answer takes it apart in a line. A woman who has not married, or who lives alone, may have heard some version of that sentence from someone who loved her. The film does not say the worry was baseless. It says the worry had the reason wrong.

The father, when it is his turn, takes the news with something close to a joke: he had always known, he says, because the boy was hopeless with a ball. It is funny, and it stings, and the film lets it do both.

The harder conversation is about something else. Adam was bullied at school as a child, and he tells his father what it was to come home and cry in his room, and how much it hurt that his father never said a word. His father’s answer is the most honest thing anyone says in the film. He heard the boy sobbing, he admits, and did not go in, because he thought that at that age he would probably have been one of the boys doing it. Then he says he is sorry, and they hold each other.

The child in that memory was a child. Whatever the other boys did, and whatever the grown man now understands about why, the boy crying in his bedroom had done nothing to earn it. The film never suggests otherwise, and neither will this.

Jamie Bell has said that what felt truest to him was that the apology does not stop the father hurting his son. Even while he is saying sorry he is still making the remark about the ball, still unable to tell which of his words will land. Parents apologise from inside the people they are.

“Aftersun, and What a Child Could Not Have Seen” argued that proximity is not access: a daughter watching her father closely for a whole holiday could not reach what was happening inside him. This scene runs the same finding the other way. A father was near enough to hear his son through a door and did not open it. What the film lets him do, thirty years late, is say so.

Meanwhile, what began with Harry’s knock has become love. Harry is distant from his own family too, and he is the first person in years to whom Adam can really talk. The film lets them be lovers without hurry and without spectacle. Their sex is filmed as closeness: two lonely men learning each other’s bodies and each other’s histories, high above a city that seems to have no one else in it.

One night they go out dancing, and they take ketamine. It is Adam’s first time; Harry lets him know it is nothing new to him. Adam loses hold of where he is, and finds himself at Christmas in the house he grew up in. The three of them are hanging lights on the tree, and his parents are singing along to the Pet Shop Boys’ “Always on My Mind”, a song about love that was felt and never properly shown.

Jamie Bell has said he understood that moment as the mother telling her son she is sorry. The conversation in the kitchen had gone wrong in words. At Christmas she says it in the only language the scene gives her, a pop song and a string of lights, and it may be the truer version.

Later he cannot sleep. He goes to his parents’ room and gets into their bed, between them, as a small boy would, and tells his mother what happened after the crash: that he was sent to live with his grandmother. She grieves for him. The shot was made in one take, the camera drawing in until only mother and son are in the frame; when it pulls back, it is Harry, not the father, lying on the other side of him. Haigh has spoken of making exactly these links, between desire, the need for love and the love of a parent. The people Adam needs are in one bed, and the film does not pretend they are separate needs.

Haigh has said that Adam “gets to be a child again.” This is what that looks like. Not the conversation he came for. A place in the bed.

Back in the flat, Adam tells Harry the part of the story he has never told. His father died at once. His mother lived on in hospital for days. His grandmother never let him see her.

Set that beside the rest and a pattern appears. As a boy he kept himself from the people he loved. As a grieving boy he was kept from the one person he most needed to see. The whole film has been about looking, and about not being allowed to look.

He takes Harry to the house to meet his parents. It is empty. Harry, frightened for him, wants to leave, and as they turn they glimpse his mother at the window. The next morning his parents tell him, gently, that he has to let them go. They take him to the restaurant he loved as a boy, and there, over the table, they ask him the one question only he can answer: whether their deaths were quick.

He tells them they both died instantly.

It is not true, and he says it for his mother. The boy who was never allowed to see her dying has become the only person at the table who knows how she died, and he decides that she need not know. It is the most loving thing he does in the film, and it is a lie. When his father begins to say that it is time to go, Adam reaches out and puts a hand over his mouth, as if he could hold the goodbye back by stopping the word; Bell has said the gesture was Scott’s own and not in the script. Then they are gone.

Here the film turns its own question around. For most of its length the question is whether a parent can see her child. At the end the child sees the parent, more fully than she can see herself, and chooses what to show her. Haigh has said that what matters in love is less what you are given than what you can do for someone who needs you, and that this holds for a parent’s love as much as a lover’s. The restaurant is that sentence, acted out by a son.

Then he goes to find Harry, and Harry is dead. He has been dead since the night he knocked on Adam’s door and was sent away. How he died, this essay will not describe.

His ghost is waiting in the kitchen, ashamed that nobody found him. “I was so scared that night,” he says. “I just needed to not be alone.” Haigh has said that this is the tragedy of Harry’s loneliness: that he was dead in that room and “no one found him, including his parents.” Somebody has found him now.

Adam takes him home. They lie down together, and Adam says into his ear the words of the song Harry half-quoted at the door that first night, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “The Power of Love”, a song that promises to keep what is frightening away from the door. The camera draws back until they are a small light among the stars.

The mother’s sentence comes back here with its full weight: a very lonely kind of life. Adam had been lonely, and so had Harry, who is young enough to have grown up after the changes Adam told her about. Haigh has said as much, that the world changing does not mean a young man today does not feel alone. She was wrong about the reason. She was not wrong that there was something to fear.

It would be easy, and unkind, to read the ending as a verdict on the night Adam kept his door shut. The film does not. A man who has spent his life keeping himself from people does not open the door to the first stranger who knocks, drunk, late at night; that is not a moral failure, it is the shape a life has taken. What the film does instead is let him find Harry, and stay, and hold him. Haigh calls the ending hopeful: love is what matters most, he has said, and queer love matters on the scale of the universe too. It may be hopeful. It is also very late. The film holds both, and does not ask us to choose.

For many readers in Japan this story arrives already known. Yamada’s novel won the first Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize in 1988 and has been translated into several languages. Its hero, in the published summaries of the plot, is a television scriptwriter of forty-seven, recently divorced, whose teenage son wants nothing to do with him, living in a building that empties at night; his only neighbour is a woman of thirty-three. In Asakusa he meets a couple who look as his parents looked when they died, keeps going back, and grows haggard. And the woman he turned away turns out to be one of the dead too.

Nobuhiko Obayashi’s film of 1988, made for Shochiku, set the parents in an old wooden flat in Asakusa, with Tsurutaro Kataoka and Kumiko Akiyoshi as the young couple and Morio Kazama as their grown son. Its farewell is a sukiyaki dinner in Asakusa, after which the parents are gone. Its ending turns suddenly to horror, and opinion on that has been divided ever since.

Akiyoshi has said that she first expected to play the other woman, the seductive neighbour, and was given the mother instead, a part she did not want at first. She came to describe that mother as a natural, easy woman laughing beside a husband who kept giving up his jobs. Years later, asked for her favourite scene, she chose one of the smallest: the mother calling from the drying platform for her son to come again, and waving her apron. Everything was gathered there, she said, including a mother’s sense of how near, and how far, she stood from her son.

Haigh changed almost everything around that core. The neighbour is a man, and a gentle one. There is no horror, and the hero has no son of his own. The dead are not draining him; in the end they are asking him to let them go and live. And the summer is gone. The novel’s Japanese title means, roughly, a summer with the strangers, and for a Japanese reader a summer in which the dead come home and must be sent back is hard not to hear as the season of Obon; one Japanese critic observed that Obayashi’s film layered exactly that tradition into its fantasy. Haigh’s film has a Christmas at its heart instead, and when it opened in Japan its title had dropped the summer too. The same critic admitted to missing it.

Yamada lived to see it. He watched the finished film in early November 2023, shortly before he died at eighty-nine; his daughter said he watched with fierce concentration and afterwards seemed satisfied and deeply moved. His wife Kazuko, who had worked for years to get his books read abroad, had died before it was finished. Her name is in the end credits.

One difference is not the film’s but the world’s. When Adam tells his mother that men like him can marry now, he is speaking of Britain. In Japan the law still does not allow two men to marry; in March 2026 the Supreme Court sent six cases on the question to its Grand Bench, after five high courts had found the present law unconstitutional and one had not. A son in Japan having Adam’s conversation today would have less to set against his mother’s fear.

There are serious objections to all of this, and some of the sharpest come from gay writers who know the territory better than this essay can.

The first is that the parents are not really people. Writing in The Guardian, Caspar Salmon found them “so thinly drawn” that they “exist only to embody the love that Adam longs for.” If he is right, this essay has spent a great deal of care on a woman the film never drew, and has borrowed an inner life for her from an actor’s interviews. It cannot wholly answer that. Foy herself said she played the mother as Adam remembered her. What is on the screen is a woman as her son recalls her, and the most this essay can claim is that the recollection is honest enough to include what hurt.

The second is that her fears are too flat to deserve defending. Jason Okundaye, who has written that his own father died before he had confirmed his sexuality, found her confusions “too pedestrian and artless to really connect”, while allowing that this might be the point: that these are ghosts “confined to the language and intellectual constraints of when they died.” This essay has taken the generous half of his sentence. A reader who heard exactly these words from a living parent is under no obligation to take it too.

The third is that the film loves despair. Barry Levitt, in the same discussion, felt that it “seems exclusively interested in gay despair”, and a gay love story that ends with one lover dead joins a long line of stories in which such lovers do not survive. Haigh calls the ending hopeful. Both can be true of the same last shot, and this essay does not pretend to settle it.

The last objection is aimed at this house. This house sells private companionship, and a film about a man alone in an empty tower, who turns away the one person who knocks, is not neutral ground for it. So it should be said plainly that the film is not on our side. What Adam lacked was not company in general. It was two particular people who had been dead for thirty years, and a third whom he had sent away. No hour arranged with anyone answers that, and an essay from this address should not suggest that it does.

Not that a parent’s acceptance is the prize. The film is gentler than that, and harder.

Being seen by a parent, as this film shows it, is not a verdict that arrives once and settles everything. It is being looked at by someone who is still herself: frightened in the words of her own time and loving in the same breath, right about you in ways she cannot name, wrong about you in ways that can go on landing for thirty years. Adam does not get a mother who says the right thing. He gets one who stays in the kitchen, who says sorry later in a song, who takes him into her bed. And then he gets something that was never part of the novel’s wish: the chance to see her whole, and to be kind with what he sees.

“Petite Maman, and Meeting Your Mother as an Equal” found that what a daughter cannot reach is her mother’s contemporaneity, the time when the woman was a person her own size with nothing yet settled. This film gives a son something past that. He is older than his mother now. He can see what her time did to her, and what it took from her, as no child can see a parent while she lives. “The Night You Need to Talk, You Need a Word, Not an Answer” took this same film as its example of the need to say a true sentence to someone who was there. The ending adds that the witness does not have to be perfect for the sentence to count.

For a reader who lives far from where she grew up, in another country or another language, the distance between her life and her parents’ words for it is measured in miles as well as years, and the kitchen scene may feel very near.

So, once, to you. If there is a sentence you never got to say to a parent, or one you said and were answered with fear, you do not have to decide tonight what the answer meant. It may have been love and fear at once. It may have been only fear. Adam is allowed to hold both without resolving them, and to go on loving the people who could not quite hear him. That is not a lesson. It is room to leave the question open.

What would you most want a parent to see about you, and did they ever have the words for it?

When someone who loved you answered you with fear, could you tell the fear from the love? Did you need to?

Is there someone whose life you now understand better than they could, and what have you chosen to spare them?

Whose loneliness have you stood close to without reaching it, and what would it take to knock?

This essay is cultural analysis. It is not clinical, it diagnoses no one, and it describes no treatment. Grief, loneliness and the rest appear in it as ways of reading a film, not as findings about any person, fictional or real.

Scenes and lines of dialogue are given as published accounts of the film report them; where those accounts differ, the essay paraphrases rather than quotes. It says nothing about how Harry died. It makes no claim about the private lives of Andrew Haigh, the actors or Taichi Yamada’s family beyond what they have said in public, and it treats no statement by a director or an actor as proof of what the film means.

The novel and the 1988 film are given only in outline, and are kept apart from the 2023 film wherever they differ.

If the film reaches a grief in you that has begun to feel dangerous rather than only sad, that is a matter for a person rather than an essay. In Japan, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s page “Mamorouyo Kokoro” lists telephone and chat lines, and TELL runs a lifeline in English.

Nothing here should be read as an endorsement of, or by, any director, actor, author, critic or publication named in it. None has any connection with this house.