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Perfectly preserved corpses return to trouble – and liberate – the living in Andrew Haigh’s masterly dramas
All of Us Strangers may have missed out on awards earlier in the year (no Bafta wins, no Oscar nominations) but it has won the prize that matters: the Guardian’s best film of 2024. It is the second time that director Andrew Haigh has received this accolade – 45 Years, his searing study of a marriage plunged into crisis, was the Guardian’s choice as best film for 2015.
On the face of it, the two films are sharply contrasting expressions of Haigh’s craft. 45 Years is resolutely realist in its portrait of a retired couple living in Norfolk, investing its middle-class milieu with an understated arthouse aesthetic. All of Us Strangers, meanwhile, returns to the gay themes that marked Haigh’s breakthrough Weekend, but in a shift from his past work operates in an unstable, dreamlike atmosphere that ultimately calls into question whether anything we are watching is supposed to be real.
But the two films share a powerful theme in common: the past’s hold over the present and the unnerving realisation that while we can never revisit our past, it has ways of finding us, sometimes shocking us into a new sense of ourselves.
Working in both cases from source material by other writers, Haigh alights on two brilliant conceits to explore this idea in each film.
In 45 Years, adapted from a short story by David Constantine, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) learns that the body of his old girlfriend Katya has been found more than 50 years after she fell into a crevasse in the Alps. This discovery disinters memories and passions that have lain deep inside Geoff, while his wife, Kate (Charlotte Rampling), scrambles to prevent the disintegration of a long and apparently happy marriage.
We never find out if Geoff makes the journey to see Katya, and we never see the body – but it looms large in our minds. As in Greek tragedy, the horrors of death are kept off stage, all the more to set our thoughts racing. In its ice-preserved youthfulness, Katya’s imagined body somehow rebukes the old age into which Geoff and Kate have sunk.
Kate is twice confronted with the image of the young Katya: in a photograph Geoff shows her (there is a resemblance between the two women) and then, in an unforgettable, Hitchcockian scene, through the primitive magic of a slideshow, which reveals Katya was pregnant.
Haigh finds an equally unsettling way to dramatise the collision between the past and the present in All of Us Strangers (which was inspired by a novel by Japanese author Taichi Yamada). Adam (Andrew Scott) has a series of encounters with his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) as they were when he last knew them, before they died in a car crash when he was 11. They have not aged in appearance and behave as if it is still 1987, yet recognise that Adam has got older – perhaps a little older than they are. They are unchanged artefacts from the past, just like Katya in 45 Years, unattached to the present and yet acting upon it.
Readings of All of Us Strangers vary, but it seems that these eerie meetings in Adam’s old childhood home may be visions from his subconscious as he wrestles with the devastating effects of losing his parents so young – as well, perhaps, as scenes from the script we see him starting. Haigh presents us with two intriguing thought experiments: what if you could meet people from your past and have the conversations you were never able to have? And what if you could talk to your parents now as they were when they were bringing you up, meeting as equals? These scenes are so carefully scripted and impeccably acted that what is inherently unreal feels intensely authentic.
In both films, the intrusion of ghosts from the past is highly disruptive. Kate and Geoff go through with their 45th wedding anniversary party, but we are left wondering if their marriage can survive. For Kate, the revelations about Katya have cast her life with Geoff into a disturbing new light, as if it were all built on a false premise. Kate seems to intuit that Geoff loved Katya more than her, and that this old relationship has shaped their marriage without her being aware of it.
Meanwhile, Adam’s meetings with his parents seem to have been part of a reckoning with long suppressed trauma on multiple fronts. In parallel with his home visits, he has embarked on a doomed relationship with Harry (Paul Mescal), which we come to interpret as another fantasy in which he plays out his apparently unfulfilled desire for a loving relationship with another man.
Both films threaten to bear out Oscar Wilde’s line that “one’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead”. Adam’s story is suffused with the sadness of bereavement and lost opportunities, but it could be regarded as more optimistic than Kate and Geoff’s in 45 Years. Adam seems to have undergone a kind of cathartic process, and – assuming he is still alive at the end of the film (as Scott says he is) – he has found, in the world he has conjured up in his mind, a potential path to happiness in the future. Kate and Geoff have much less time ahead of them to find an authentic way to live, whether together or – as seems more likely – apart.
But whatever future awaits his characters, Haigh seems to be reminding us that the past will always cast its shadow over us, whoever we are. You don’t have to have lost your parents in a car crash to mourn the passing of your childhood world; you don’t have to be haunted by a decades-old tragedy to be troubled by the way your life has turned out. Haigh’s innovative exploration of our vexed relationship with the past gives both these remarkable films their deep melancholy power.
All of Us Strangers and 45 Years both won the Guardian’s film of the year. That’s not all that unites them
