"Come on in, then."

TIFF is wrapping up, and I finally have time to write again – so, hi!

I had a wonderful time. My body is collapsing, sure, and if last year is any indication I’m about to spend the next week zoning out in the middle of conversations. But right now I’m in a great place. The whole Canadian slate was well-received, the award winners all deserved their prizes, and I have at least four or five other pictures that I’m working to launch elsewhere.

Honestly, watching audiences embrace the conceptual swings and raw emotion of Arianna Martinez’ Do I Know You from Somewhere? and Marie-Hélène Viens and Philippe Lupien’s You Are Not Alone left me with a high that carried me through the back half of the whole thing. Also, spending half an hour onstage with David Cronenberg and getting to feel the love and admiration radiating at him from a packed house at the Royal Alex is something I’ve been waiting for my entire career to experience.

And speaking of raw emotion and wild swings – which is also something Cronenberg offers in The Shrouds, a shattering drama about how throwing yourself into your work after a devastating loss will not save you even a little bit – the Criterion edition of Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers arrived on shelves last week.

I wrote a few words about Haigh’s exceptional drama last December, when I made my list of 2023’s best feature films. Nine months on, it still feels like a thrilling, crushing statement about the rarity of genuine connection and understanding, either with a romantic partner or a family member. “Being seen” is a phrase that’s become interchangeable with being recognized and embraced by someone you hope will recognize and embrace you, and that’s an idea Haigh wants to explore in every permutation.

Adam (Andrew Scott) is alone in London, isolated in a high-rise where he seems to be the only inhabitant – until he meets Harry (Paul Mescal), who’s charming and attentive and a little bit sad himself. They have undeniable chemistry, and a relationship seems like a good idea … but Adam still finds himself drawn back to his childhood home near Croydon, where his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) are still hanging about … despite having been dead for some thirty years.

What’s happening? And why? I have my own theory, but honestly this is one film where the why of it feels almost irrelevant once the credits roll: Whatever happened happened, as the saying goes. What matters is how you felt about it.

All of Us Strangers is a movie about how we’re all still children inside, I think, or at least how the passage of time doesn’t stop us feeling unfinished and adolescent – and how rare it is, as an adult, to encounter someone who understands and accepts that. But it’s also about the things we’d say to our parents if we could speak to them as fellow adults, and what we’d need them to say to us. It’s quiet and beautiful and deeply, deeply sad. Of course it is.

I’d imported Disney’s UK Blu-ray – which is all-region, by the way – when it was released in June; of course, Criterion announced its North American edition hours after my order shipped. I don’t regret it. Some part of me genuinely believes the only reason there’s a Criterion edition of this film is because I ordered the UK disc. (Hey, it’s happened before.) But you know what? It’s fine. Criterion was kind enough to send me the 4K combo, so it’s a win-win for everybody. You can never have too many copies of a masterpiece.

The UHD platter obviously improves on the Blu-ray presentation through a subtle HDR grade that deepens the film’s palette of shadows into something in which you can get lost along with the characters – while also making sure the details of Adam’s parents’ ’80s fashion and grooming choices are brought to unsettling life. You can almost feel the sweat in the air when Adam and Harry go dancing; you can definitely see the split ends in Claire Foy’s permed hair.

Haigh and DP Jamie D. Ramsay shot All of Us Strangers on 35mm, and once again the specific qualities of celluloid are catnip to the 4K mastering process; there’s a depth and a weight to the UHD presentation that feels like memories coming back into sharp focus. It’s all there, captured forever … and in DTS-HD Master Audio, too.

Special features on the companion Blu-ray are modest but meaningful: Criterion paired Haigh with film critic Michael Koresky for a half-hour conversation that delves into the film’s deeply, deeply personal themes about queer life, loneliness, connection and grief, as well as the decision to abandon almost everything from Taichi Yamada’s novel beyond its premise.

Haigh also speaks to his casting of Scott as his own avatar and Bell and Foy as versions of his own parents, trying to make things feel as authentic to his own experience as possible; indeed, the location used for Adam’s parents’ house was Haigh’s own childhood home, barely redressed at all.

A separate featurette finds cinematographer Ramsay anchoring a walk through the film’s aesthetic of exaggerated authenticity, starting with the decision to depict Adam’s isolation as a confined existence within every space he occupies – even when he’s outdoors – before he meets Paul and opens up again.

Ramsay also discusses the use of an LED volume, similar to the Star Trek virtual stage situation, to create the perfect condo for Adam: The buildings, an isolated pair of towers in East London, were real, but the apartment itself was built on a stage surrounded by monitors displaying the appropriate exterior view. I’d never have guessed.

A “behind the scenes” section offers three Searchlight Pictures featurettes, all of which draw on the same EPK material. The 23-minute “Television Special” opens with a staged chat between Scott and Mescal about their chemistry and their characters, but pivots into looks at the shoot and the sets, digging into the specificity of the props scattered around Adam’s parents’ home and how meaningful it was for Haigh to shoot crucial scenes in his own childhood bedroom. All four principal actors are present, along with Haigh and producer Sarah Harvey.

The other two featurettes, “Roots of the Story” and “Building Adam’s World” – which were the only supplements on the UK disc – break out the relevant chunks of the television special into six-minute sprints through their relevant subjects, with a couple of modest differences in the interview material. I’m glad they’re here; it helps quell my OCD and lets me be okay with passing the BD along to a dear friend. This is a movie that deserves to be shared with people, after all.

All of Us Strangers is now available on 4K and Blu-ray editions from the Criterion Collection.

Up next: Arrow Video gives David Twohy’s The Chronicles of Riddick the 20^th anniversary edition no one saw coming. Except maybe David Twohy. See you soon.