WHAT WOULD YOU do if you visited your childhood home, and your parents, as young as they were when you were a small child, opened the door, and recognised you immediately? Only, you’re still you in the here and now and have lived, aged and erred, for some decades in their absence. This is one of the premises that permeates Andrew Haigh’s beautiful essay on loss, loneliness and the need for love, All of Us Strangers, onscreen at Cinema Nouveau countrywide.

Like a poem, or a many-layered watercolour with aching acuity and breathtaking beauty, the idea of the whole big world and the story’s protagonist, Adam (Andrew Scott), who is a writer, are presented as counterfoils to one another. He is alone with his computer, hunched darkly in a cardigan, over ideas which are stubborn in emerging, in a huge London building, silent as the tomb.

And then, there is Harry (Paul Mescal). Twenty-one floors below Adam. The two meet over an incident with an alarm, and a spark against that demolishing loneliness of being in the world, flares. It’s a relationship which sputters to full life after an encounter between Adam and his late parents. But Harry is never given agency of his own or the kind of context that could flesh him out. He’s Adam’s foil against being alone.

Adam was orphaned before he became a teenager. And in his writing and his thought processes, that house and those young parents of his are intact and there, to answer his knock on their door, when he makes it. And this unleashes a whole nest of worms about reality and dream, knowledge and mystery which lends the work a surreal hue that doesn’t let you hold on. But it also doesn’t let you go.

The enormity of all-embracing loneliness is central to the tale. But Adam’s sexuality is its nub. He must tell his parents. This is as much about coming out as it is about facing your 30-something-year-old mother and introducing your adult self to her, knowing that she comes of a generation unable to empathise. There are some powerful lines for both Adam’s parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy), that reflect a generational discomfort about homosexuality. Things that are difficult to hear.

And then there’s the issue of explicit sex in films of this nature. Is the petting and thrusting, the sucking and throbbing really completely necessary to a plot which is rich in nuance, adult in reflection and sophisticated in thinking? The sexiness of sex could be handled so much more powerfully and dramatically with a sense of the implicit that could enhance its lure rather than reduce bodies to pieces of throbbing meat.

Evocative of Charlie Kaufman extraordinary and disturbing 2020 film I’m thinking of ending things, All of Us Strangers is premised on well-trodden pop psychology tropes: what would you say to your 18-year-old self, kind of thing. And these are cliches because they reach so close to the bone, to unwrapping who we are, who we think we are. There’s a universality to this beautiful film, which is also about you, whether or not you are gay; whether or not your parents are still alive. It’s about being in the world as an accountable adult, with all your broken bits and all the pieces you cherish.

The work has different levels of closure, the last being the most devastating and abysmal. It’s a difficult film to watch, and one that takes as much as it gives. Bring tissues.

• All of Us Strangers is directed by Andrew Haigh and written by Andrew Haigh based on the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada. With a cast headed by Jamie Bell, Claire Foy, Carter John Grout, Paul Mescal, Andrew Scott and Ami Tredrea, it is produced by Peter Czernin and Sarah Harvey and features creative input by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch (music), Jamie Ramsay (cinematography), Jonathan Alberts (editing), Kahleen Crawford (casting), Sarah Finlay (production design) and Sarah Blenkinsop (costumes). It released in South Africa on 26 January 2024.