Tom Salinsky

Ever find you just can’t remember the name of a film? I really enjoyed The End We Start From but whenever I wanted to tell someone about it, I couldn’t remember what it was called. Begin at the End? Starting at the End? Ending the Story? Finishing the Starting? So it was with Strange People, I mean All Strange Together, I mean The Strangers We Are, oh look, you know what I mean.

I have to confess that the prospect of watching this one struck me as the cinematic equivalent of eating my greens – Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal being gloomy for two hours, yay – but I was completely unprepared for how weird, off-kilter, lyrical and moving this ended up being. To examine it fully means spoilers, so I’ll dance around a few things in this brief review, but honestly – do yourself a favour and just go and see it.

Scott’s Adam is an isolated writer living in a terrifyingly uninhabited huge tower block, who reluctantly hooks up with Mescal’s Harry before a personal crisis takes him back to his home town, where he seemingly interacts with his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) who haven’t seen him since he was twelve years old, for the very good reason that that was how old he was when they both died in a car crash.

Mescal and Scott are seemingly an odd pairing. Scott’s a very “busy” actor, and it’s greatly to his credit that I’ve never seen a performance of his collapse under the weight of tics and mannerisms. But cut Paul Mescal and he bleeds pure naturalism. Although also Irish, he sounds Manchester here, and it’s never distracting, and despite their differing approaches, this also never feels like a clash of acting styles. Foy and Bell are superb too, and the only other credited actors are Adam’s 12-year-old self and a waitress.

But don’t let that fool you into thinking that this feels like a play. Although it is mainly people talking in rooms, writer-director Andrew Haigh makes it all feel effortlessly cinematic. And given the premise, you’ll rapidly grasp that few if any of the conversations are in any way possible, and yet all of them feel completely convincing, detailed and relatable.

Things get further fractured, dreamlike and bizarre from there, but Haigh wants us to feel, and not to question. The final twist never feels like a Twilight Zone ending – further cementing a kinship between this and Mescal’s triumph in Aftersun. To me there seemed to be clues throughout that Adam had died in a fire basically as soon as the movie started, but there’s no Jacob’s Ladder-style pull-back-and-reveal and so I wasn’t left feeling unfulfilled because I wasn’t being offered a nice neat ending, rather I felt vaguely ashamed that I’d been thinking along such ploddingly prosaic lines.

I gather this was based on Japanese book by one Taichi Yamada whose oeuvre I am not familiar with. But if the very cursory synopsis on Wikipedia is any guide at all, it seems as if the novel would be the shit version of this idea, whereas the movie version is quite transcendent.