Young Reporter - All Of Us Strangers & Grief - Colchester, Tia Baker

All of us strangers is a British independent film directed by Andrew Haigh in 2023. It recently aired in cinemas and is now available to stream in Disney+. It follows the life of a gay screenwriter called Adam who is exploring a relationship at the same time of discovering his dead parents are alive and the same age as they were 30 years ago.  

The film offers an insight of coming to terms with grief as refusal and craving the comfort and validation that isn’t available anymore from someone you need it from most. His coping mechanisms are shown to be a reality he creates in his head where his parents are still alive and the story follows him having to accept letting go of this false reality to proceed in his day to day life.

 In the film, Adam converses with the ghosts of his parents about himself in order to gain closure and as a form of healing from the trauma of growing up as a gay man in the 80s. By having Adam come to terms with his reality 30 years after the death of his parents illustrates how grief is a non - linear process and a pain that lasts a lifetime.The loneliness of Adam’s character and the emptiness of his home are able to symbolise how grief creates this challenging mental state and how it affects someone's daily life.

At the end of the film it is revealed that Adam was also having a romantic relationship with a ghost who he only met once when alive. This reveals Adams inability to move on from things as well as letting real people in his life, showing a raw representation of how grieving people can struggle with coming to terms with forming and keeping relationships. The heartbreaking ending shows Adam and Harry together in bed after Adam realises Harry is also dead. This allows the audience to understand that the story is overall a portrayal of love. It represents love as being powerful enough to break the boundaries of life and death and accepting this is the only way to live with the darkness that is grief.