Warning: This story contains spoilers for “All of Us Strangers.”
If you need a movie to make you cry, “All Of Us Strangers” will achieve that.
“Fleabag” star Andrew Scott, whose lack of a nomination for best actor at the 2024 Oscars has been considered a snub, and Paul Mescal star in the film directed and written by Andrew Haigh.
Based on the novel “Strangers” by Taichi Yamada, “All of Us Strangers” follows Adam (Scott) as he attempts to write a script about his parents, who died in a car accident when he was a kid. But he begins seeing and interacting with them in the present at his childhood home — only they still look and act like how he remembers them.
At the same time, in Adam’s nearly deserted apartment complex, he begins developing a relationship with Harry (Mescal) that eventually leads to its own twists.
The romantic fantasy-drama film touches on themes of relationships, loneliness and grief, carrying a ghostly feeling throughout. The story takes place in a large city, London, but has a lonely, small-town feel, accentuating the isolation Adam feels and how it could be detached from reality — all leading up to a heartbreaking, and slightly unclear, ending.
Here’s a breakdown of what happens at the end of “All Of Us Strangers.”
Were Adam’s parents really there?
After Adam attempts to introduce Harry to his deceased parents, portrayed by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, Harry runs away.
Adam has a few final moments with his parents, until they decide that he “shouldn’t keep visiting,” cutting off the type of contact they’ve been having throughout the film in order for him to move on.
But were they ever actually there? That might the wrong question altogether.
In an earlier scene, after Adam asks his mom if “this,” meaning all of their meetings, are real, she responds, “Does it feel real?”
Adam eventually says goodbye to his parents’ ghosts, returns to his building and visits Harry’s apartment for the first time — making a discovery that leads to a tragic revelation.
What happened to Harry?
To understand Harry’s fate, it’s important to remember how Harry and Adam first meet. In one of the film’s opening scenes, Mescal’s character knocks on Adam’s door drunk, holding a bottle of alcohol and looking for company, which Adam declines.
What seems like the next day, they run into each other in the elevator bank, and Harry apologizes. They begin a relationship that almost solely takes place in Adam’s apartment and develops parallel to Adam’s emotional reconnection with his parents.
At the end of the film, after Adam says goodbye to his parents and walks inside Harry’s apartment, he notices details like drugs on the counter, a mess in the kitchen and a static TV. He also makes an expression seemingly of disgust.
When he reaches the bedroom, he immediately turns away in apparent horror. He eventually walks into the room, and it’s revealed that Harry is dead — and has been for a while.
When Adam leaves Harry’s room after spending some time with his corpse, he runs into the Harry he knows, who turns out to be a ghost, just like his parents.
“I’m in there, aren’t I?” Harry asks, starting to break down. Adam reassures him that it’s all going to be OK.
As Adam continues to talks with Harry’s ghost, they hug each other in bed, ending the film with a long shot set to the ’80s song “The Power of Love.” The camera zooms out as both characters appear to turn into something like stars, becoming part of the universe, together.
What has the cast and crew said about the ending?
Before the film’s ending, Harry’s whereabouts outside of the context of his relationship with Adam remained a mystery — something Mescal approached intentionally with his performance.
“I wanted to play Harry as somebody who’s trying to hide his pain the whole way up until the ending,” Mescal told Dazed about the film’s ending. “I wanted him to not show his pain, and I think I failed in the moment when I said, ‘I know what it’s like to stop caring about yourself,’ because I was looking at Andrew and he was upsetting me so much.”
Haigh, the director of “All of Us Strangers,” says the film is about love and loss — all at once.
“By the end of the film, to me, it is basically saying that what is important in life is love in whatever way you manage to find that, whether it’s in a relationship, whether it’s with your parents, whether it’s with a friend. You go through life finding love, losing love, and finding it again,” Haigh told Time.
While Adam is the focus of the film, he’s also not the most reliable narrator when it comes to drawing concrete conclusions about what is happening around him. Yet, his lines of thinking and mourning seem to take the viewer into a dream-like journey of imagining the “what ifs.”
As such, most of the movie can be left up to the interpretation of the viewer. Adam might have been imagining what a relationship would have been like with people he’s lost, like when he comes out to his parents and processes how they might have reacted.
Or, he may have been reflecting on the different paths he could’ve taken in his life, such as the relationship that might have been if he had let Harry into his apartment that first night instead of turning him away.
Or, maybe it’s both.
“Our imagination is so alive, and time is not a linear logic. To bring that memory to life is not as absurd as you might think,” Scott told Dazed.
Both Haigh and Scott agreed in interviews with EW — the logic of what happened isn’t what matters. It’s the “feeling.”
“I feel very strongly that the film is like a dream,” Scott told EW’s “Awardist” podcast. “You wake up from a very, very potent dream and you can feel so sad; you can wake up with floods of tears; you can wake up screaming; you can wake up laughing. I don’t think you go, ‘What happened in the dream? Let’s rewind it.’ We try desperately to understand it, but I think Andrew’s achievement is that he directs us towards the feeling, rather than the logic of what the feeling might be. The most important thing, and the most difficult thing to do, is making the audience genuinely moved.”