All of Us Strangers · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man stands at a window on a high floor of a nearly empty tower. Below him, London goes on being London. On the glass, his own face floats over the city, close and see-through. Andrew Haigh returns to this composition all through All of Us Strangers, and the film is already in it. Adam is in the room and out over the city at once. Neither image cancels the other. The glass won't choose.

Deleuze had a name for an image that behaves this way. He was looking at mirrors in Ophüls and Welles rather than at tower-block windows, but the concept travels. He called it a crystal-image. The idea is less forbidding than the word. Usually we take one image as the actual thing happening, and file memory, dream and reflection behind it as commentary on it. Occasionally a film makes an image in which the actual thing and its virtual double trade places so fast you can't say which one you're watching. Caught mid-exchange, that's the crystal. Deleuze cared about it because it's where cinema stops using time to measure movement and starts showing time itself.

Haigh earns the concept by refusing to cheat. The dead parents are lit and shot with exactly the tactile solidity given to Harry. Jamie D. Ramsay photographs Jamie Bell and Claire Foy handheld, close, shallow, warm, the same way he photographs Paul Mescal. No chill in the light. No wobble in the frame. No creature effects anywhere; the premise is carried by performance, staging, editing and light. This is Bazin's argument put to a strange use. Bazin praised the long take and continuous space because they preserve ambiguity and leave the viewer to decide what is in front of them. Haigh points that honesty at the impossible, and the camera's testimony holds. If the image will not lie, and the image shows your mother at the kitchen table, then she is at the kitchen table.

Which raises the question the film's structure answers. Adam takes a train to the suburbs. Jonathan Alberts's editing elides the transitions between flat and house until Adam seems to slip between present and past without the usual connective tissue of travel. Notice what Haigh has not made: a flashback. Deleuze, following Bergson, separates the recollection-image (dated, bracketed, clearly labelled "then") from what he calls sheets of past. The past in this account isn't stored behind the present like film in a can. It coexists with the present in regions, and we don't retrieve a memory so much as leap into the region and then descend inside it. Haigh gives no date card and no dissolve-to-memory. He gives a region: a house at Christmas, dressed in period detail, with two people in it still the age they were when they died. Adam walks around in it as a grown man. That is why these scenes can go where memory cannot. When he comes out to his mother, she answers, and she answers badly, the era's unexamined limits intact and love running underneath them. A remembered mother could only repeat. This one can be surprised.

Two crystals run at once here, and they are built differently. The suburban house is a crystal in formation: it grows from a seed, and the seed is real, since Haigh shot in the actual house he grew up in. Something biographical is dropped into the fiction and the whole structure crystallizes around it. The tower is the other kind, the sealed one, Deleuze's perfect crystal: a world of reflections with no outside. Half-lit corridors, vacant floors, one figure doubled in enormous panes. On a first viewing that reads as loneliness rendered architecturally. After the reveal it reads as plain fact. There was never an outside. That's the difference between this film's late reversal and a puzzle film's. Nothing is solved. The building turns out to have been telling you the truth from the start, and the earlier images light up differently on the walk home. An image that must be read back rather than watched forward is what Deleuze calls a lectosign, and Mescal's performance is engineered for exactly that: tender and forward on first pass, unbearable on second.

Adam is a screenwriter who cannot write. Not a detail; the engine. Deleuze's account of postwar cinema turns on characters who meet situations too large or too finished for any action to touch, and who become watchers instead of agents. He calls such a figure a seer. Adam's situation was closed before the film began. His parents died thirty-odd years ago, and behind them stands the AIDS-shadowed generation of gay men who came of age in the 1980s. No act reverses that. So the film gives up suspense almost entirely, replaces it with the pressure of grief looking for somewhere to go, and hands its dramatic burden to a face. Scott works in micro-expression, held for long stretches in shallow focus. That is what Deleuze means by an intensive face: feeling building by small degrees toward a threshold instead of discharging into action. The tower supplies the matching space, not a setting where things happen but a vast half-lit somewhere that no longer supports doing.

When Adam finally does move, the film takes the movement away from him and gives it to the world. In the club, on ketamine, the cutting goes associative and dreamlike around a man who is essentially still. Deleuze noticed this in musical numbers and in drug sequences: the character stops moving and the world starts, dancing in their place. Haigh scales it up for the ending, two bodies in a bed receding into a field of stars, achieved with dissolve and scale-play rather than spectacle. Same operation, cosmic size. It's why the ending consoles instead of concluding.

None of this arrives from nowhere. The architecture is inherited from The Discarnates (1988): lonely writer, dead parents preserved at the age they died, a fellow tenant who turns out to be the film's other supernatural fact. The two-hander grammar is Haigh's own, worked out in Weekend (2011), where handheld shallow-focus long takes let queer intimacy assemble in near-real time out of talk. The withheld reversal and the performance-led long take come from 45 Years (2015), where a preserved past retroactively recolors a marriage. The songs come from Terence Davies. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) established the period needle-drop as an emotional time machine rather than scoring, and The Long Day Closes (1992) made the childhood home into warm nostalgic light and drifting camera, a lonely boy's interiority given as a room. "The Power of Love" isn't a cue in this film. It's a region of the past you can walk into. The elliptical cross-cutting that folds past into present, with glass and reflection as the uncanny's material, is Don't Look Now (1973), which also ends on a reversal that reorganizes everything before it.

Haigh's own invention is the refusal of any visual marker for the unreal. It costs him the genre's usual pleasures. No dread, no rules, no explanation. What it buys is something the ghost story almost never gets: the dead granted the same photographic respect as the living, so mourning can be staged as a conversation instead of a haunting. The current wave of grief films that use genre unreality has produced nothing else this rigorous, and the method is portable. Never mark the vision, and the audience is forced to hold both readings at once, which is exactly the condition a grieving person lives in.

Watch it again for the windows. Count how often Adam is doubled in glass, and notice the compositions have been telling you the answer since the first reel. Then sit with the question the crystal leaves open. If the past is a place you can go back to and be answered from, what was it, exactly, that ended?