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The film All of Us Strangers is a story of internalised homophobia and loneliness, filled with sadness yet also with love and hope. The film is a beautiful evocation of the liveliness and strength of internalised objects, as the protagonist's external and internal worlds fuse, albeit in fantasy.
Adam is a lonely screenwriter in his forties who lives in an apartment with a view over London. He is trying to write about his parents. Disturbing emotions keep him from writing and tell him it is time to face the past and the lost chance to grow up with his parents. Adam was only twelve when his parents were killed in a car accident. His father died immediately, but his mother, blinded in the accident, survived for two days in hospital. Adam never got the chance to say goodbye to her as his grandmother thought that seeing his mother dying would be too traumatic. His grandparents could not help Adam with his loss. He kept his sorrow inside, alongside his loneliness and the shame of being bullied at school. Under his bed, Adam has a box filled with memories—photos, toys, and a fairy he used to hang at the top of the family Christmas tree every year.
One day Harry, who lives in the same building, knocks on Adam's door. Harry is openly flirtatious and clearly drunk. Adam turns down his offer to share a bottle of whiskey in his company. But Harry's invitation awakens Adam's feeling of loneliness and the longing for the parental love of which he was deprived. Anxious to be loved and accepted by his parents who never knew him as a homosexual man, Adam seeks the connection with his internalised parents and memories and simultaneously, from this point in the film, begins to phantasise that he forms a relationship with Harry.
Adam starts visiting his parents' and childhood home. The only clue the audience is given that the visits are not taking place in the real outside world, but in his mind, is the fact that his parents are the age they must have been when they died, and the setting