Andrew Haigh On How Grief Can Mutate As We Get Older for ‘All Of Us Strangers’

Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is the best film of the year to me. It’s a film where the characters don’t even know how vulnerable their hearts are, and they respond to their emotions before their heads can catch up. Director Andrew Haigh has painted a portrait of a queer man whose ties to his parents have been left untethered. His grief is like a somber live wire, sparking off feelings he thought he kept hidden. This is beautifully complex work, and I think more audiences will discover the film’s power as they grow older.

I admitted to Haigh that when I was a kid my mom would tell me to lie about her age if anyone asked. They never did–trust me, no one cared. She always wanted me to tell people that she was 37, and now that I have reached the age of 40, thinking about that seemingly off-the-cuff white lie feels strange to me. I am now older than my mother’s coveted age. Did Haigh want to confront how we will, eventually, become older than the memories of our parents?

“I’m fifty now, and for the last fifteen years or so, I keep remembering my mum’s fortieth birthday,” Haigh says. “It’s so weird that I have become that age. I think what it speaks to is that when you’re a kid, you assume that your parents know everything. They should have all the answers. When you get to those ages, you realize that you don’t know the answers either. As we made this film, it made me more compassionate towards parenting. We are all kids trapped in adult bodies trying to be better to our kids, and we’re not always successful.

If you have lost your parents, people will always apologize when you tell them. Both of my parents are gone, and even though it’s been a few years, the automatic response is for someone to tell me that they are sorry. After Andrew Scott’s Adam and Paul Mescal’s Harry share an evening of passion, they sit and talk–as you do. After Harry apologizes, Adam says, ‘Thanks, it was a long time ago,’ and Harry quickly responds with, “I don’t think that matters.” There is no beat between those last two lines, and it hit me that Haigh is expressing how grief and loss can change over time or evolve. One might assume that that’s a throwaway bit of dialogue, but it carries extraordinary nuance and heft.

“Those two lines of dialogue speak to so much of what the film is about,” he says. “Grief, like any form of pain or trauma, is something we are told to get over. Of course, it doesn’t go away. We can try to push it down or ignore it as much as we can. It’s always there bubbling around. What I love about that scene and Harry’s response is that he understands that. He’s compassionate about that. That’s the moment that they could be falling in love with one another. Harry is so understanding in that moment, and Adam probably thinks about his parents every single day. It’s not a visceral sense of pain, but it is lingering. If anything, it’s a film about compassion for someone as they face their pain. That is a moment where that really comes to the surface.”

As our brief conversation came to a close, we kept mentioning how that evolution of loss can linger. It might numb over time, but the love we have for people doesn’t ever fade. It lingers and presses on us in different ways, but that intense love never disappears.

“Love almost gets stronger the more you are away from someone,” Haigh says. “That can happen a lot of different ways, but if you lose someone, I think that feeling stays the same. If not, it gets stronger and stronger and stronger and never dissipates. That love can still build even if that person is no longer here.”

All Of Us Strangers is in theaters now. It expands to more theaters over the coming weeks.