All of Us Strangers (2023)

All of Us Strangers is Andrew Haigh's masterful ghost story and love story braided into one — a film about a lonely screenwriter named Adam (Andrew Scott) who, living alone in a near-empty London tower block, strikes up a tender romance with his downstairs neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal) and simultaneously begins to visit his childhood home, where his parents — who died in a car crash thirty years ago — are somehow still alive and exactly as he remembers them.

Haigh, working from Taichi Yamada's 1987 novel Strangers, shapes the supernatural elements not as horror but as an expression of grief's logic: the way the dead linger in imagination, the conversations we never got to have, the acceptances we never received. The scenes between Adam and his parents (played with devastating warmth by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) are among the most emotionally precise of any film in recent memory — funny and heartsick and full of the specific texture of a childhood home.

Anchored by Andrew Scott's profoundly open performance and the luminous chemistry between Scott and Mescal, All of Us Strangers asks how we learn to love when we never fully learned it growing up. It is a film of immense compassion, one that aches with the weight of all that grief and loneliness can cost a person — and all that love, however strange and fleeting, can give back.