„All of Us Strangers“ (2023) by Andrew Haigh based on the novel „Strangers“ by Taichi Yamada, last scene:
HARRY
How long will this last?
A beat. A memory of something Adam’s Mum said to him.
ADAM
I can’t answer that. I suppose we
don’t get to decide when it’s
over.
(then)
For now, why don’t I just hold you
a bit longer.
Harry looks as if he may be about to say something but
decides against it. They don’t need to declare their
love. Actions are enough.
Harry turns over and lets Adam hold him from behind. The
same position Harry was in downstairs. But now he is no
longer by himself.
HARRY
(barely a whisper)
It’s so quiet in here. I never
could stand how quiet this place
was. Will you put a record on?
ADAM
What would you like?
HARRY
You choose.
The piano introduction to THE POWER OF LOVE by FRANKIE
GOES TO HOLLYWOOD starts to play. We don’t need to know
how. Adam whispers with the opening words.
ADAM
I’ll protect you from the hooded
claw / Keep the vampires from your
door.
Harry smiles.
As the song builds, Adam holds Harry tighter, comforted
at last, cared for at last, no longer strangers. Harry’s
breathing slows.
“Love is the light, scaring darkness away”.

While All of Us Strangers was tricky, both tonally and as a story rooted deeply in internal experience, another challenge of the project for Alberts was figuring out how to grapple with the way in which the protagonist ends up “slipping between these worlds of the 1980s and contemporary London” in the story.

“We wanted the audience to feel dislocated, but anchored, not mired in confusion, but consistently questioning, is this real? Is this not real?” says the editor. “I feel like you always want to have an audience ask those questions, and you want to keep them active, and to keep putting the puzzle together. But when you’re creating a film that is essentially a bit of a puzzle, it’s always a question of, is this puzzle going to fit together? Because you can create a puzzle that doesn’t quite fit together, and people are just like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on.’”

This is often the case, Alberts says, “in early cuts of films,” though All of Us Strangers was “delicate editorially,” on the whole, and could have easily been steered in the wrong direction.

Part of the goal for Haigh, as far as the viewing experience, was to leave his audience looking inward and asking themselves questions of their own lives in the aftermath. “We wanted the film to live on and linger on in their minds, so that asking those questions reveals stuff about their own lives and stuff about their own stories,” he says, “stuff about the people they’ve loved in their lives and the people they’ve lost.” https://deadline.com/video/all-of-us-strangers-editing-andrew-haigh-jonathan-alberts-interview/

And what the hell is the ending about?

In the last scene of All of Us Strangers, Adam and Harry cuddle up together on a bed. Harry asks Adam to put on a record, and without him doing so, The Power of Love by Frankie Goes to Hollywood comes on – Adam was watching an old Top of the Pops performance of it from 1984 when Harry came knocking at the beginning of the film. The song contains the deeply romantic declaration “I’ll protect you from the Hooded Claw / Keep the vampires from your door”; in a (to him, unconscious) allusion to the lyrics, Harry had told Adam, as the older man turned him away, “there’s vampires outside my door”.

Now Adam and Harry can truly love, console, protect and care for each other, but it’s a brutally bittersweet image as it’s happening in some kind of supernatural realm, not real life. As the camera gets further and further away from the spooning lovers, it depicts them as one of a constellation of stars in a night sky, perhaps the other lonely strangers of the film’s title.

So is Adam also dead? I don’t think Haigh means us to think that he is. I think the image says that love is strong enough to smash the boundary between life and death, and that it’s our only defence against the infinite darkness that surrounds us, something Adam has come to understand after spending a lifetime running away from his own desperate need for human connection. Now, I think I may have something in my eye …
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/26/all-of-us-strangers-sex-death-ghosts-and-that-ending-discuss-with-spoilers

Much of All of Us Strangers’ emotional power comes from the brutally repressed Adam attempting to dispel his feelings of shame and isolation in order to be seen and loved for the person he truly is. To this end, he takes the opportunity, denied to him by their death, to come out to his mum and dad, separately. His mum is shocked – “Isn’t it a very lonely life?” – and worried about Aids. His dad, not unkindly, says: “We always knew you were a bit tutti-frutti.” Says Haigh: “The coming-out scenes are about the importance of being known. It’s very hard to move through life if you feel you’re not understood. And if you’re not understood, you feel you’re alone.”

Adam asks his father why he would never come into his room to comfort him when he was crying after being bullied at school – something else Haigh suffered. “I was about nine, and the kids around me knew something was different about me before I really did,” he says. “So you’re like, ‘I don’t understand why you’re calling me these names.’ But they could feel it somehow. When my mum saw the film, she was like, ‘Is this what happened to you?’ And I was like, ‘Yes.’ If you’re a queer kid, you don’t want to tell your parents you’re being bullied, because they’re going to think you’re different, and that’s the last thing you want. It’s the hardest thing, sometimes, about being queer within a family – you’re not like your parents and you have a secret.”

As its narcotic, dreamlike feel sets in, All of Us Strangers increasingly wrongfoots the audience. “I saw the film as a spiral, and it kept getting woozier and stranger,” Haigh says. Adam starts to get feverish, which is unexplained in the film, though Haigh points out that it happens after his mother mentions Aids. “I think all of us gay men of that generation know that every time we had a bit of a sweat if we were having sex with other people, we were suddenly terrified that we were going to have HIV,” Haigh says. “A swollen gland was not just a swollen gland. I wanted to have that trickling under the surface, that Aids is another fear that Adam has buried. I’m telling a ghost story – what are the things that haunt him?”

Although the film has a particular, queer point of view, Andrew Haigh believes its universal themes make it accessible to everyone. “All of us are children, a lot of us are parents, a lot of us are in a relationship or not finding love. Look, I want 15-year-olds to see this movie, not just people our age. If I had seen this film when I was 15, it would probably have made a big difference to me.”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/dec/29/a-generation-of-queer-people-are-grieving-for-the-childhood-they-never-had-andrew-haigh-on-all-of-us-strangers