Movie Details
Director-Andrew Haigh
Cast-Andrew Scott,Paul Mescal,Carter John Grout
Movie type- Romantic fantasy
Producers-Sarah Harvey
Release date 22 nd December 2023
IMDB Rating-7.9
Languages-English
Duration-1 Hour 45 Minutes
Trailer
Synopsis
He view from the window onto the city skyline hides a complex beauty. You probably say so too, if, like lonely Adam ( Andrew Scott ), you make a living comfortably from typing text in Word. Complicated because the glass of the skyscraper in which he lives acts as a barrier protecting against experiencing the world; it is like a photo wallpaper or a screensaver that too often reminds us of the growing distance from real life. The hero lives in a deserted skyscraper à la Ben Wheatley’s ” High Rise ” on the outskirts of London, but it could also be Warsaw’s Złota 44. You know the type. Most of the day, Adam tries to write an autobiographical script about the pain of discrimination he experienced in the English countryside. However, he does so with moderate success. When the sun goes down and the lights of the big city create the right mood, he loads the herb into a futuristic vaporizer, takes a puff and fires up the immortal “Power of Love” from Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Then he falls asleep. Then he gets up and turns on the computer. The melancholy of his routine is just a symptom of Good Strangers ‘ sensibilities; although slightly exalted and built from familiar clichés, it still pulsates with emotional truth.
Two events will break the hero from the peculiar rhythm of day and night: meeting his only neighbor, the attractive Harry ( Paul Mescal ), and traveling to his parents’ house, which will bring back memories of their tragic death several decades ago. In “Good Strangers” Andrew Haigh equates the past and the possible, playing out the past and the future on the same plane of sensitive narrative. Two lonely residents of a large skyscraper will quickly develop deeper feelings. After all, love is like an energy , as Holly Johnson sings, but surprisingly, in the film, Haigha also has the ability to magically raise the dead. The rooms of the family home will suddenly be filled with the noise of joy at the reunion. The mother ( Claire Foy ) will bombard her son with questions about the period of separation, and the father ( Jamie Bell ) will smile invitingly over a glass of whiskey. Time has treated my parents kindly, or rather, not at all. They are younger than Adam by at least a few years, dressed the same as the day he lost them, without a single wrinkle on their faces. The brilliant move sounds like a director’s declaration, a clear avoidance of the alluring romanticization of trauma. Conversations at the family table, although deeply moving, never cease to remind us of their strange unreality and, furthermore, of the fact that it is only a temporary state that will have to end someday in order to move forward.
The defenseless inner child in “Good Strangers” is evoked by the relationship with his parents. External adult – a romance with Harry, with whom the hero shares loneliness and confusion. In the surreal space of an empty skyscraper, their love seems complementary, as if their relationship was the only element that allowed them to escape from the past. Somewhere between a party in a nightclub and a loving morning on the couch, however, you have to ask the question: are you sure? Haigh very wisely distributes the director’s accents, telling with compassionate warmth about the personal disarray that makes life seem not like a road but an endless loop. Although the plot is embedded in the topic of homosexual exclusion and unprocessed mourning, it also touches on a universal reflection on contemporary masculinity, with the exclusion of emotional problems at the forefront. This is why the director is so interested in the moments of cracks in which Adam’s boyish defenselessness emerges from behind the façade of feigned imperturbability. In one of the most brilliant moments of the film, the protagonist, tormented by fear of his parents’ impending departure, crawls into their bed at night. He is a child again, seeking refuge from the terrifying passing of time in his mother’s arms. He is also a grown man, taking one last look at the times when everything was simpler. They both need to learn to let go.
Haigh’s film takes as its source material the novel “Strangers” by Taichi Yamada, already adapted to the screen by Nobuhiko Obayashi . Unlike ” Ijintachi tono natsu “, ” Good Strangers ” abandons its horror origins in favor of a quiet reflection on the nature of memory and never-processed loss. Anxiety is replaced by intimacy and elegance. However, changing the setting does not wash away the history of Japaneseness written into the code. A journey through the ghosts of trauma has something of Hirokazu Koreeda’s After Life , in which ghosts, instead of scaring, persist in people’s everyday lives. They are conversation companions. Similarly, here, an encounter with apparitions is characterized by the dynamics of visits to grandparents whom you call too rarely. However, the difference is that blurring the generational difference will allow Adam to honestly delve into the meaning of the tragically broken relationship, work through parental neglect and the closeness that has been missing for years. Haigh’s film does this without reproach, warmly talking about the therapeutic value of dialogue and confrontation. And that, contrary to appearances, there is always time for it.
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