Netflix wants to fool us, but mystery movies are one of the best things

Simone Meier

This is probably the worst thing about Netflix (and other streamers): that less and less is expected of us. That there is a creeping simplification of our visual consumption. Complex content disappears and a concentrated audience is no longer expected. Just don’t give up on puzzles! Just don’t leave any insecurities in the room!

The average Netflix junkie (a commendable exception currently being “Leave the World Behind”) goes like this: Someone finds themselves in a bad situation. She has something to do with his past. That’s why there are thirty thousand flashbacks. And tens of millions of inner monologues. And if something happens, you can be sure you’ll see many more replays of it. It’s like being caught in an advertising loop. However, the actors in commercials are often better. After fifteen minutes everything is so clear, mysterious and unrolled that the Earth has lost its three-dimensionality and has actually shrunk into a disk.

How different is a film like “All of Us Strangers”! How pleasantly enigmatic! And the story starts very simply. Screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott, the ‘sexy priest’ from ‘Fleabag’) tries to reconstruct the 80s; he wants to write about his own childhood, about his parents, who died in a car accident when he was not yet twelve. Adam lives in a high-rise on the outskirts of London, with only one neighbor who stands out: Harry (Paul Mescal, the sexy Irishman from ‘Normal People’ and soon to be the new ‘Gladiator’). How convenient that Adam and Harry are both gay.

Harry looks like he’s from one of the ’80s music videos that Adam has on TV all the time now. He could be a member of the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood, whose “Power of Love” plays a role on many levels. Harry complains about too much silence, sure, you think at first, he’s a party boy who likes to use ketamine, how can he tolerate a little silence, but there’s something wrong with the silence.

And something else is right: Adam, whose greatest trauma is that he was never able to tell his parents that he just didn’t like women, goes to the city of his youth. To Dorking in the suburbs of London. Knocks on the door of his parents’ house. And there they are, mother (Claire Foy, the first queen from “The Crown”) and father (Jamie Bell, once “Billy Elliot”), both alive and young, forever preserved in the last days before their deaths. Forever 1987.

Parent and child start a conversation. Between yesterday and today and this world and the next, the mother wants to know if she died quickly, Adam lies to her, the father has less trouble with Adam’s homosexuality than the mother, who can only think of AIDS when she hears the word “gay “. the great scourge of the 80s. And Adam, who like all children wants nothing more than his parents’ absolution and love, becomes addicted to the home visits – which may just be fantastic figments of his overstimulated psyche, we don’t know.

Because, as is possible in good fiction and nowhere else, here the laws of logic between time and reality are subverted and explained into something new. A statement is being made that only a truly excellent ensemble can convincingly implement. And yes, they can! Even on stage, the British-Irish quartet has the power to evoke another possibility of reality in such a way that we believe it, but in the cinema their faces become magical landscapes in close-up in which feelings and experiences, their valleys and grooves and scars, especially Claire Foy and Andrew Scott, are a revelation of nuance. And Mescal’s bearish, frivolous coolness is the wonderful balance this emotionally powerful, intimate film about love, death and eternity needs.

‘All of Us Strangers’ is the second film adaptation of the novel ‘Strangers’ by Taichi Yamada, who died in November at the age of 89. The director is the British Andrew Haigh. At a young age he assisted in the editing of ‘Gladiator’ and ‘Black Hawk Down’ and in recent years he worked as director on Brit Marling’s ambitiously failed Netflix fantasy multi-part ‘The OA’. ”. At least in the first season you were confidently confronted with puzzles and not taken by the hand like in kindergarten. Marling’s influence on Haigh is clearly visible, in the preciously arranged images of almost interstellar loneliness and in the ending, not a note of which will be revealed here.

Until then, you can do a lot of detective work yourself and ask yourself a thousand things and you should definitely keep every detail in your head, stay alert to look and listen, pay attention to vocal lines, views and rooms. It is worth it ..

‘All of Us Strangers’ will be in cinemas from February 8.