I still feel suffused with the golden light and intense motion of Andrew Haigh’s masterful exploration of individual and generational grief.

It feels like a lyrical Lanthimos film, with everything seeming like reality except for one fundamental shift. Adam (Andrew Scott) lives a solitary life in a London tower block. There seems to be only two apartments occupied and he meets the dishevelled Harry (Paul Mescal) when he knocks on his door late one night, looking for friendship or a hook up – anything to keep ‘the vampires from his door’.

Adam is a writer, delving into the story of his parents who died in a car crash when he was 11. This is where the shift happens as, travelling to his childhood home, he finds his parents there. They are the people they were when they died, younger than Adam is now – his mum played by Claire Foy and Dad by Jamie Bell.

As he keeps returning, he gets to say all the things he couldn’t – why he was so sad as a boy, that he’s gay, what life was like living with his granny.  Interwoven is his burgeoning relationship with Harry and the letting go of the trauma of the past and the filling of his cup with the potential of the future.

It feels like a metaphor for the grief of a generation of gay men who were othered and minimised as children, forced to hide and pretend by well-being but ignorant parents and then buried under the scourge of HIV. Harry is the next generation, comfortable with his sexuality but still feeling ‘lesser than’ in his family and, like Adam, alone in this mausoleum of a tower block.

Based on the novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, the title All of Us Strangers hints at the separateness of our lives, where we could be lonely like Adam but still refuse the friendship of another through fear. Of what? Perhaps more rejection. The 80s music that punctuates the score gives us the answer, perhaps a little prosaically in the final scene but with an emotional punch to the chest. The power of love.