You look totally different, but it's still you.

All Of Us Strangers — 3/5

There's something new here. In its conceit, it's found an easy way to tug on heart strings. To view your parents at your age, as the age they were? Adult conversations between mother and father and child without the constant 20, 30, 40-year difference; finally equals, and with an understanding that they don't belong here, so no need to guard the conversations. It's an idea that could easily fit into a Christian movie network but here, placed out of that context, it can be taken seriously. Unfortunately, that newness and easy emotional connection is dragged down by Andrew Scott's sad potato sack. He's Joaquin Phoenix in 'Her,' and that early 2000s bullshit of shy guys who don't know how to connect so they just look at things. Fortunately, Claire Foy and Jamie Bell and Paul Mescal inject the movie with life every time they appear, working double-shift to fill the hole on the other side. And so the movie does connect, sometimes in spite of itself. But then it goes beyond what it is, to make something even more new, though I can't for the life of me figure out how intentional it is. I think this movie goes from a beautiful ghost story to a full-on horror movie. There is no easy segue between real life and fantasy. It all just exists at once. At first we can wave it away as a writer exploring a thought, but then it becomes full-fledged psychological horror; a crazy person going about their life, seemingly finding closure before coming home at the end to fully embrace that craziness. The end of the movie—their two bodies intertwined as they become a star in a constellation—seems like it wants to be hope, but it just feels like descent. I'm sure there's a read on this movie that can get me to change my mind, but it seems to me a movie about the security of insanity, delivered as a good thing, and I can't go all the way with that.