All Of Us Strangers Ending Explained - What Happened To Harry?
This article contains discussions of suicide.
Written and directed by Andrew Haigh and adapted from Taichi Yamada's 1987 novel "Strangers," the 2023 film "All of Us Strangers" is a stunning, dark, and unexpectedly hopeful look at love, grief, connection, and memory. Upon its release at the Telluride Film Festival in August of that year, it won critics over pretty much immediately, earning a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and scoring nominations at major awards ceremonies. Though it didn't earn any nominations at the Academy Awards, the movie picked up at the British Independent Film Awards, the National Board of Review, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, and more, and it's certainly a standout film from 2023.
It's undeniable that "All of Us Strangers" is a deeply emotional and incredible film, but it does have an ending that could be a little confusing to some viewers. So what exactly happens in this film? What should you know about Haigh's intended message, and what happens to lovers Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Paul Mescal) when their story comes to a close? Here's everything you should know about the final moments of "All of Us Strangers."
What you need to remember about the plot of All of Us Strangers
In case you've forgotten some of the finer details of "All of Us Strangers" before its ending, here's a quick refresher. The movie opens on Andrew Scott's Adam, a writer who lives alone in a large London apartment building and is struggling with feelings of isolation. Even so, when he meets Harry one night in his building — and Harry asks if they could have a drink together — Adam shuts down his advances, even though Harry is clearly interested in a romantic sense. It's only when Adam goes to his apparently abandoned childhood home to write that things take a truly strange turn.
Despite the fact that Adam's parents died in a car accident when he was twelve years old (his father died instantly, but his mother struggled in the hospital for days before passing away), he sees them in their house, stuck at the ages at which they died. From there, Adam starts visiting his parents — played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell — with regularity, even confiding in his mother and revealing that he's gay. The family is able to overcome some emotional issues from their past, and Adam's parents seem to know that they're dead, even asking how they died and if it was brief. (Adam lies and says that it was for both of them.) Alongside his relationship with his dead parents, who only appear at their house, Adam does start a relationship with Harry, and the two are immediately inseparable and begin to fall in love. Then, Adam decides to bring Harry to visit his parents.
What happened at the end of All of Us Strangers?
Upon visiting the apparently empty house of Adam's parents, Harry seems incredibly unsettled, insisting that the two return to London even as Adam continues knocking on the windows in a desperate bid to conjure up the specters of his family. Adam wakes up with his parents the next morning and they tell him that Harry left and also tell him that he needs to move on and , all visiting a restaurant Adam loved as a child before he goes back to London to see Harry. It's there that Adam makes a truly gut-wrenching discovery.
Throughout the film, Adam and Harry either spend time in Adam's apartment or out in London, so when Adam goes into Harry's apartment, he finds something incredibly horrible. The place is a mess, with empty liquor bottles and evidence of drug use scattered everywhere, as well as an awful smell. It's then that Adam discovers Harry's dead body in the bedroom, clutching a bottle of whiskey ... the same bottle that Harry was carrying the night they first met, when Adam turned him down for a drink. Harry's ghost then appears to Adam, visibly emotional and saying he never wanted Adam to see his body. The two go back to Adam's apartment, lie in bed together, and hold one another while listening to a record before the film comes to a close.
What the ending of All of Us Strangers means
Though "All of Us Strangers" includes a few context clues that ultimately lead to the reveal that Harry died the night he met Adam — he's wearing the same shirt at the film's beginning and ending, and Adam briefly glimpses TV static through Harry's window at the start of the movie that's seen again when he discovers Harry's body, indicating it's been on the entire time — the ending is still quite shocking. So what does it all mean? Why can Adam see the dead, and why do these specific people appear to him?
There's never any sort of clear-cut scientific explanation as to why Adam can see ghosts, and it's better that way; over-explaining the concept of "All of Us Strangers" would be a true disservice to the film. The message of the ending is really about grief and love, and how if you isolate yourself from the world, you could miss fulfilling connections with others. It's not Adam's fault that Harry dies after he turns him down initially, but the audience is certainly left to wonder about what might have happened if they'd gone ahead and had that drink on the very first night. As far as Adam's parents go, it's clear, through his conversations with them, that he's lived his adult life wondering if they would have loved him fully, and the grief he feels over losing them at a young age only intensifies that internal question. Adam's ending is, truly, bittersweet; he gets closure with his parents but realizes he's lost one form of Harry, and the ending of the pair in bed together leaves things ambiguous as to whether or not the man and the specter will be able to stay together in any sort of way.
Could the ending of All of Us Strangers also mean Adam is dead?
There's another way to read the ending of "All of Us Strangers," which is that Harry and Adam's parents aren't the only dead people in the movie. It's certainly possible to argue that, throughout the entirety of the movie, Adam is also dead.
While there isn't any direct evidence that Adam is dead along with his parents and Harry, it's actually a pretty interesting theory — and there's also nothing in the movie that contradicts it. Adam discusses, with his parents, that he was sent to live with his grandmother after his parents died and was extremely unhappy; it's not impossible that he died in adulthood. (Unfortunately, due to the fact that Adam is depicted as completely isolated at the outset of the film, a version of this theory could suggest that Adam died by suicide, and the same reading could be extended to Harry as well.) Adam doesn't interact with anybody besides his family and Harry throughout "All of Us Strangers," and he begins the story by himself in a run-down tower-style structure in London that feels a bit like some sort of purgatory. Again, it's not canon that Adam is dead, but someone could definitely infer that from the film.
Director Andrew Haigh says All of Us Stranger has a hopeful ending
So what has Andrew Haigh said about the ending of "All of Us Strangers," and does he think it's sad or dark? No, actually — he thinks the ending of the film shows that Adam has experienced growth now that he's opened himself up to connection and love, and that the character can potentially move forward with his life.
In an interview with Time Magazine where Haigh discussed the movie — including the fact that he used his own childhood home as a stand-in for Adam's, centering it as a key location in the film — and interviewer Matthew Jacobs asked the director if the ending can be viewing as a statement that life as a queer man is one of isolation and loneliness. Haigh disagreed, saying that's not his intention at all. "There is hope in the fact that he has understood that, basically, he is capable of being in love and being loved and being there for someone else that might need him in that moment," Haigh said. "By the end of the film, to me, it is basically saying that what is important in life is love in whatever way you manage to find that, whether it's in a relationship, whether it's with your parents, whether it's with a friend."
While Haigh did say he could have concocted a more optimistic ending for the film, he just didn't think that would work and that he prefers a "complicated" ending. "Now, look, there's a version of this story where it ends in a much happier place, for sure," he admitted. "I needed to bring it to a level beyond that. Just a nice, simplistic, happy ending doesn't quite work for me with this."
The ending of All of Us Strangers makes Paul Mescal cry
Star Paul Mescal, known for his breakout role in the Hulu original series "Normal People," also discussed the ending of "All of Us Strangers," and admitted that one of Harry's final lines makes him extremely emotional. Mescal earned a BAFTA nod for supporting actor for playing Harry (though he lost to eventual Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr.) and had nothing but great things to say about working with Andrew Haigh and his scene partner Andrew Scott, but did say that Harry's ending was tough for him to watch in an interview with Vogue.
Asked if he'd cried over the film at any point during the film's press tour, Mescal said that during a Q&A in Los Angeles, he watched the end of a screening and welled up at the moment where Adam finds Harry's body, citing Harry's line "How come no one found me?" as a particularly painful moment. "I just think, for a human being to get to that point and have to articulate something as basic as that? It's such an awful state of affair," Mescal said.
The actor also said that Harry feels like the film's most joyful character, which makes his fate even sadder. "And for the person that says it to be somebody that you associate with joy in the film—Harry is a positive force," he continued. "He's definitely fighting his own demons, but to see him that vulnerable always gets me. I think he's such a beautiful boy, and has been deserted by people that he loves on the basis of them not being able to navigate his sexuality, which is such an insane thing to comprehend now. That bit gets me pretty consistently."
An important song soundtracks the beginning and end of All of Us Strangera
There's also an important musical moment that ends and begins "All of Us Strangers" — specifically, the song "The Power of Love" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which was released as a single in 1984. Not only does the song bookend the film, but lines from it appear at the beginning and end as well. When Harry asks Adam to join him for a drink at the start of the movie, he says there are "vampires" at his door, referencing the line that Adam later says to Harry in bed when the film ends: ""I'll protect you from the hooded claw / Keep the vampires from your door." In an interview with Vulture, Andrew Haigh opened up about how, as a young queer boy in England, he listened to "The Power of Love" all the time, and using it in "All of Us Strangers" was enormously important for him — particularly because Frankie Goes to Hollywood was an openly queer band.
"The idea that I used to love that song as an 11-year-old queer kid living in suburban England and that I could put it in a film years and years later, now being very open about my sexuality, is something I never thought would actually be a possibility," Haigh told the outlet. "And I can make a film with queer content — again, something I never thought would be a possibility ... I was like, 'F*** it, that's going at the end of the film.' There was no way I was not doing that. I wouldn't even care if nobody liked it."
"All of Us Strangers" is streaming on Hulu now.
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