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If you just want to know if this is a good film or not; it is. Go and see it and come back here when you have.

Okay, spoilers follow because to have a proper discussion about this movie you need to be able to track where it goes, what it’s high points are and where it doesn’t quite work.

Yep, you read that right. While I think parts of this film are just magnificent, I am not in total agreement with most reviews which have widely hailed it as a new masterwork of cinema. Overall I found it to be a beautifully touching parable to loss and longing, identify and belonging, but the end was a real disappointment. After the rest of film, which was undeniably delicate and subtle, I found the very last shot in particular to be oddly heavy handed.

Let’s get into the final moment (I told you we were heading straight for spoilers). On the surface what we see is the image of Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal’s lovers lying together on a bed blending into a bright light which eventually becomes a star within outer space. This might just be an isolated image but it strongly courts a deeper reading and I can’t think of one that isn’t a bit corny. Have they gone to heaven? Are they just part of a larger universe? Are the trials of two men in love insignificant in the bigger scheme of things? Really? Please give me something else. Seriously, if you there is anything that properly justifies this imagery then I want to hear it. It is just a single moment but with all that had come before it seemed to jar, and it is the very last thing we are left with.

In terms of interpretations of the rest of the story, moments before the end I was initially sure of what the intention had been and it was wonderful, if tragically, poetic. Throughout the film we have seen Scott’s Adam managing two relationships. The first with his parents, miraculously back having died decades earlier – this plunging him into a pit of loneliness, and the one with Harry who seems to be able to finally deliver him from it. The reveal at the end as I saw it is that both turn out to have been recollections of departed loved ones. Adam is imagining the moments with his Mum and Dad that were stolen from him, and so to it turns out is the case with Harry, also dead. That is pretty heartbreaking. Not a huge surprise though, which pulled the punch a little. It was evident to me that Harry wasn’t really there throughout either. We’ve known since The Sixth Sense to see dead people and we’re not going to easily get caught out like that again. When we looked back on that movie and realised that Bruce Willis had not actually interacted with anyone apart from Haley Joel Osment we were kicking ourselves but once bitten twice shy. We are looking out for it now and it was obvious here.

This isn’t what undermined the denouement though. There are things that get in the way of this reading and for me the film would have been better if they weren’t included.

There is something in how Harry is wearing the same clothes and clutching the same whiskey bottle that he had on that apparent first meeting with Adam, when he turned him away from his door. Did they never really have a relationship then. Was he a ghost the whole time, had he gone back upstairs that night and immediately overdosed? For me this isn’t as neat as my alternative and I did find it to be a smart ambiguity, it’s a frustrating inconsistency. If he is a ghost then that is different to Adam’s folks too, because they are demonstrably not.

Adam’s meeting with his deceased parents are clearly in his mind and nowhere else, he is effectively having waking fantasies of being able to see them now and whose has not had these imaginings of those we’ve lost when we’ve closed our eyes at night and then woken happy sad in the morning. It’s all there; so much of this part of the story plays out with dream logic. All of this I adored. The conversations Adam has with his long deceased parents are just magnificent, challenging on occasion but always underpinned by the love they had for one another. These scenes are where All of Us Strangers truly excels and will hit home for anyone who has had a relatable bereavement. So much so that the moments between Adam and Harry just distract. The fact that his dealings with Harry are ultimately similar nicely brings these two elements together though,

unless they’re not and they don’t.

They actually need to be for the movie to be perfect so leaving this open, with factors that cannot be reconciled does feel like a misstep. Having Harry’s presence also as recollections of a relationship from years before works with their age difference too. It all just fits which is why I didn’t like that it actually didn’t. For me, and I know and am pleased that others will disagree, it makes a slight mess of a story that is otherwise so tight and conclusive.

I’ve heard others suggest that Adam is dead too but that misreading is not on writer/director Andrew Haigh because he can be seen by the waitress at the end. Where Haigh perhaps needs to take responsibility is in inviting wider readings when he seemed to have already given us the perfect one.

In the end the reason I care so much is because as a whole All of Us Strangers is brilliant, it certainly moved me and the performances from Scott and Jamie Bell and Claire Foy as the parents are superb. Ultimately though, this movie that others are hailing as a masterpiece missed a few strokes and for something that is being celebrated for it’s originality it also put me in mind of a better film; Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman, where someone else has an impossible meeting with a parent.

So as I said at the start, you should most certainly see All of Us Strangers. It is more than just a good film; it is exceptional. It’s almost faultless.