Haigh, already a noteworthy creator of quietly powerful imagery and soundscapes, takes a significant leap forward in both ambition and accomplishment here; the opening shot of this film immediately signals Haigh’s intent to stretch cinematographer Jamie Ramsay’s considerable talents as far as they’ll go. Shooting on film also lends a texture that perfectly complements the film’s exploration of liminal spaces and memory. The small cast, meanwhile, is uniformly great, but Andrew Scott’s lead performance here is absolutely devastating and deserving of your time and attention.
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Haigh has already made something of a sneaky ghost story in 45 Years, so that he revisited the genre more explicitly isn’t entirely out of character. What is out of character is the emotional directness and stylistic intensity (there are moments that evoke Jacob’s Ladder, of all things — not a film I would have ever linked to Haigh before yesterday) he deploys in telling the story of Adam (Scott), a man in his forties living alone in a barely populated apartment building who kindles a (simultaneously touching and very sexy) relationship with a neighbor, (Paul Mescal, who continues to just exude charisma from his pores). He also discovers, less prosaically, that he is able to return to his childhood home and visit his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy), still the age they were when they died in his childhood. His reengagement with them and his developing romance combine to push him to the edges of his understanding of those relationships, the boundaries of reality, and himself.
I’m actually not going to talk too much more about the film itself, so feel free to bail out now, but to add context to my personal response: 20 years ago, my parents died suddenly and unexpectedly less than 18 months apart. I had just turned 19 when my father died, and was barely 20 when my mother died. I’m only just coming to terms with the way the gravity well of my childhood and those losses and others have distorted and stunted my ability to maintain healthy relationships; there’s a monologue by Scott about two-thirds through the film that matches nearly word-for-word some of my attempts to articulate that pain — just one of a dozen instances where I felt like Haigh’s script had been constructed in a lab specifically to wreck me. I spent most of the last 45 minutes struggling to see the screen and trying not to shake the whole row of theater seats.
Obviously, not everyone will relate as intensely to the film’s specifics — just as I can’t totally relate to the details of queer life that Haigh so delicately observes — but I think there are so many avenues into the emotional cores of the film that I imagine most adults who are open to the experience will find themselves carrying it with them, as I will.
I’m actually not going to talk too much more about the film itself, so feel free to bail out now, but to add context to my personal response: 20 years ago, my parents died suddenly and unexpectedly less than 18 months apart. I had just turned 19 when my father died, and was barely 20 when my mother died. I’m only just coming to terms with the way the gravity well of my childhood and those losses and others have distorted and stunted my ability to maintain healthy relationships; there’s a monologue by Scott about two-thirds through the film that matches nearly word-for-word some of my attempts to articulate that pain — just one of a dozen instances where I felt like Haigh’s script had been constructed in a lab specifically to wreck me. I spent most of the last 45 minutes struggling to see the screen and trying not to shake the whole row of theater seats.
Obviously, not everyone will relate as intensely to the film’s specifics — just as I can’t totally relate to the details of queer life that Haigh so delicately observes — but I think there are so many avenues into the emotional cores of the film that I imagine most adults who are open to the experience will find themselves carrying it with them, as I will.
