Who says love and ghosts can’t mix? The official trailer for Searchlight Picture’s All of Us Strangers starring Fleabag‘s Andrew Scott and Oscar-nominee Paul Mescal has dropped and it looks like a gay ghost romance for the ages.
Directed by Looking‘s Andrew Haigh, All of Us Strangers stars Scott as Adam, a 40-something British writer who falls for his neighbor Harry, played by Mescal. Over the course of their budding relationship, Adam reveals to Harry that his parents died shortly before his twelfth birthday. “I’m trying to write about them at the moment,” Adam admits to Harry.
The trailer finds Adam traveling back to his childhood home, outside of London, for inspiration. When he arrives he’s greeted by physical manifestations of his dead parents, played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, who appear to him as the ages that they were when they died—eerily close to the age that Adam is now. “You were just a boy,” Foy says to Adam. “And now you’re not.” As Adam faces the ghosts of his parents, his relationship with Harry evolves as the two fall deeper for each other. The trailer careens between clips of Harry and Adam dancing at clubs and lovingly caressing each other, and Adam’s attempt to reckon with the wreckage of his past.
“I wanted it to all feel very integrated, like our memories do and like how we go through life—the pain we carry around is always just there, hidden, and it can come up and feel incredibly real,” Haigh told Vanity Fair for our first-look feature on the film. “It was always about that feeling when you’re just about to fall asleep or you just wake up from a dream—when everything feels a little bit strange.”
“It’s funny it doesn’t take much to make you feel the way you felt back there again,” says Adam. All of Us Strangers will screen at the New York Film Festival before Searchlight Pictures releases the film in theaters on December 22.