Review: 'All of Us Strangers' looks at how memory comforts and cocoons, in a tender drama led by Andrew Scott's riveting performance

The strength of memory, and the fragility of it, are on display in “All of Us Strangers,” writer-director Andrew Haigh’s hauntingly tender drama about a writer stuck between his past and his potential future.

Adam, played beautifully by Andrew Scott (“Fleabag,” “Sherlock”), is a screenwriter living alone in a sparsely populated London apartment block. When there’s a fire alarm, he dutifully heads down the stairs and outside — and notices one of the few other tenants, still with his light on, upstairs. That neighbor, Harry (Paul Mescal), ventures down sometime later, rather drunk, offering Adam to join him in a drink. Adam declines in the moment, but leaves open the possibility to meet up another time.

Adam, seeking inspiration for his screenplay, takes the train out to the suburbs, to his childhood home. When he knocks on the door, he’s surprised when his parents, played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, answer and welcome him in. It’s surprising because they look just as they did 30 years ago, when Adam was 12 — and they died in a car crash.

The chance to get a hug from Mum or talk with Dad is so appealing that Adam, for the moment, doesn’t think about the impossibility of it all. He returns to the house a few more times, but the visits get more awkward — particularly when Mum reacts badly to the news that Adam doesn’t have any girlfriends and is, in fact, gay.

Meanwhile, Adam and Harry start seeing more of each other — and things get serious enough that Adam considers taking Harry to meet his parents, as odd as that may seem.

Haigh, adapting the novel “Strangers” by the Japanese author Taichi Yamada (who died in November), gently shows Adam trying to reconcile his childhood memory of his parents with his now-adult viewpoint of who they were and who they might have become had they lived. Haigh also forces Adam to consider whether he can live in a comfortable past or face an uncertain future, possibly with Harry in it.

The movie gathers together a quartet of fine acting. Mescal’s turn as an unsteady paramour is touching, and Foy and Bell are compelling as the mid-‘90s young parents who learn on the fly as they reckon with the fact of their little boy being a grown man. And Scott gives a stirring performance, as Adam balances between childhood memories and the reality of his life. The combination of these four actors, and Haigh’s careful handling of Adam’s journey, gives “All of Us Strangers” an emotional punch that a viewer will find hard to shake.

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‘All of Us Strangers’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 26, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content, language and some drug use. Running time: 105 minutes.