The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Andrew Haigh · written and directed by Andrew Haigh · 2023 · about 105 minutes · freely after Taichi Yamada’s novel Strangers
Mode
Ghost story turned into a chamber drama of grief and love; domestic comedy, romance and horror image in one
Mythos
The descent to the dead, Orpheus inverted: a son goes down to recover his own unfinished childhood; the visitor by night who is of the other world, from the Japanese ghost story
Phase
Two strands woven through one present, the tower and the house, crossing in a night of drugs and fever, closing in a leave-taking, a discovery and a star
Presentation
Feature film, about 105 minutes, in English and in colour; Jamie D. Ramsay’s photography, Jonathan Alberts’s cutting, music by Emilie Levienez-Farrouch, with popular songs of the 1980s carrying structure
Register
Warm, aching and understated in the house, cool and spare in the tower, with dread at the edges and a cosmic close
Scale
One man’s consciousness, his mother, his father and his lover, with the fear of the 1980s and a near-empty city behind them
Governing Proposition
A screenwriter of about forty, living almost alone in a new London tower, begins an affair with the only other resident he sees, and at the same time goes back to the house of his childhood and finds his parents there, alive and as young as when they died. The wager of the film is that a ghost story can carry a reckoning with a family and with a decade: that a man who lost his parents before they could know him can have, as a grown man, the conversations a boy could not, and that love offered to the dead is real and cannot hold them.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
A man sits at a desk in a flat high in a new tower block in London, with the city below and almost no one in the building. He is Adam, a screenwriter of about forty, played by Andrew Scott, and he is not writing. The corridors are empty, and so is nearly every flat. A fire alarm sounds at night. The emptiness and the alarm are planted here, and the film will pay them.
The one other resident is Harry, played by Paul Mescal, a younger man, who knocks at Adam’s door one night and is not let in. They meet again, and become lovers. Mescal holds Harry at a deliberate opacity: warm, frank, and somehow not wholly present, a figure the film declines to explain. The question the tower poses is the film’s question, whether a man formed by an early loss and by the fear of the 1980s can let anyone in now, and it is staged in a building where there is nobody else to let in.
Andrew Haigh wrote and directed the film, freely adapting Taichi Yamada’s novel Ijintachi to no natsu (1987), translated as Strangers, which Nobuhiko Obayashi had filmed as The Discarnates (1988). It was produced by Searchlight Pictures with Film4 and Blueprint Pictures, photographed by Jamie D. Ramsay, cut by Jonathan Alberts, and scored by Emilie Levienez-Farrouch. It runs about 105 minutes, in English and in colour. It had its premiere at Telluride in September 2023 and was released in the United States in December 2023 and in Britain in January 2024. This page judges the film as released.
Movement II
Adam takes a train out of the city to the suburb where he grew up, and on a common he sees a man he knows: his father, played by Jamie Bell, who died with his mother in a car crash in the late 1980s, when Adam was a boy. He follows him home without a word, and the door opens on his mother, played by Claire Foy. They are alive, and they are the age they were when they died, Adam’s age or younger. It is the film’s first height, an ordinary suburban afternoon turned uncanny, and the film makes nothing of the impossibility. It simply goes on.
The crossing is never marked. Adam steps out of the tower and into the house, the light shifts from the cool of the one to the warmth of the other, and the cutting does not stop to say that a border has been passed. The audience holds his grief the way he does, as a place one simply goes. Reflections in glass, in windows and mirrors, double the figures throughout, and keep the question of what is real in the image rather than in the plot. Change the form, give the passage a rule or a door, and the film would stop knowing what it knows.
The parents being as young as their son is the form’s decisive choice. A man meets his mother and father as peers, and the conversations that a boy of twelve could not have become possible, and painful, and funny. Foy and Bell play them as people of their decade, and Scott becomes a boy in their presence without any change of voice, at the level of the face and of reaction. The image says it plainly: a man of forty in his childhood pyjamas.
Movement III
Adam comes out to his mother in her kitchen. Her reaction is the centre of the film, and it is not cruelty. It is a love that reaches for the only frames her decade gave her, illness and a lonely life, and fears for him. Foy plays her fear and her love in one movement. Adam listens, and the scene rests on his listening: he hears in her questions what he has told himself for thirty years, the verdict of an era he came of age in, loneliness as a sentence he half believes. The film discloses a condition here, not a mood, and it holds.
Later his father admits that he heard the boy crying in his room and did not go in. Bell lands it with very little. The admission discloses a second truth beside the mother’s, that the reticence of such fathers was itself a kind of fear, and the son, now a man, can hear it from a man of his own age. Each visit is a stage in something Adam could not do at twelve: to be seen as a grown man, to be known by his mother, to be answered by his father. Each requires the last.
At Christmas the family stand round the tree and sing “Always on My Mind” as the Pet Shop Boys sang it. The scene rises by understatement, a lit suburban room and a song of the decade, and it shows the film’s use of its songs: the popular music of the 1980s is its subject and not its decoration, the sound of the house and of the fear that lay outside it. The visits keep their pattern, arrival, warmth, a hard conversation and a return to the tower, and the pattern comes round once more than the argument needs.
Movement IV
The two strands cross in a night out with Harry, a club and then a fever of ketamine and grief, in which the tower and the house run together. It is the film’s loosest passage. Meant as ecstasy, it is level, and it borrows a stock grammar of delirium to restate what the uncut crossings between worlds have already shown. The making falters here as nowhere else, and some of the transitions round it lean on music to do their work.
Then the parents say goodbye. They and Adam sit together for the last time, and while they speak the parents fade and the light in the room changes. It is the summit of the parents’ strand, and it obeys the old law of such stories: the dead who are visited cannot follow the living past the threshold. The film is a descent to the dead, built, not cited, with Orpheus inverted, the son going down to recover not a lover but his own unfinished childhood, and coming back without it.
The descent is soft at its rules. The film never says why the parents appear now, what the house is, or what the visits cost Adam, and it defends the vagueness as grief’s logic: a place one goes. That leaves the film’s law loose at its edges, and it is the main reason the myth, strong as it is, stops short of the highest figures. The parents admit a second reading too, as a screenplay Adam writes in his head, and the film kept a writer at a desk at its opening so that the reading would stand.
Movement V
Adam goes to Harry’s flat and finds his body there. Harry has been dead since the night he first knocked and was not let in. The horror image is earned and not lingered on, though the discovery is handled with more device than the film’s quiet elsewhere, and it can be felt as a turn of plot laid over a film that had obeyed feeling. It is seeded from the first scenes, the empty building, the alarm, the knock refused; and it states the film’s law a second time. The dead are present as long as they are loved, and love offered to the dead is real and cannot hold them. The second ghost, the lover who visits by night and is of the other world, keeps the inheritance of the Japanese ghost story, and the two ghost lines rhyme.
The last scene is the film’s highest. The two men lie together while “The Power of Love” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood plays, a song of protection given to a man who is already dead, and the camera draws back until they are a point of light among stars. The two strands close in that image, and the revelation sends a viewer back through every scene in the tower to ask who saw Harry, and when, and whether he was ever there. The film supports more than one answer. The star at the close reaches for the mythic by image more than by built consequence, and the last movement leans from meaning toward mood, leaving open whether the whole was grief’s projection.
What holds the film below Tier IV is plain. Its swerve is one of subject and feeling more than of form, made on paths the grief fantasy and the queer chamber drama had already proved; its reach, after three years, is forecast; its survival is presence, not yet demonstration; and its world is four people, with labour, the state and the order of nature kept to the edges. Moonlight, nearest in subject, a queer life formed by a parent and a decade, stands at 8.2 with a bolder wager of form; Euripides’ Alcestis, the dead returned to the living for a while, stands at 8.2 on its long survival. What the film has made is its own: a man meeting his parents as peers, a crossing that is never marked, and a law of love and loss that holds from a Christmas tree to a star.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test and the two strands resist it, because each is the other’s proof. The visits home are required: each is a stage in something Adam could not do at twelve, first being seen as a grown man, then coming out to his mother in her kitchen, then hearing his father admit that he heard the boy crying and did not go in, then the leave-taking. Harry is required because the film’s question is whether a man formed by that loss and by the fear of the 1980s can let anyone in now, and the answer is staged in the tower. The fire alarm and the empty building are planted and paid by the ending. What gives: the visits repeat their pattern once more than the argument needs, and the club night restates in delirium what the cutting has shown.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a man who lost his parents before he could be known by them carries the conversation he never had as a wound, and a generation of gay men who came of age under the fear of the 1980s carries that era’s verdict, loneliness, as a sentence it half believes. The mother’s reaction is the centre: not cruelty but a love that reaches for the only frames her decade gave her, illness and a lonely life, and Adam hears in it what he has told himself for thirty years. The father’s admission discloses a second truth, that such fathers’ reticence was itself a kind of fear. Image discloses as fully: a man of forty in his childhood pyjamas. What holds the figure: the last movement turns from meaning toward mood.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of one warm, aching kind, with dread at the edges. Adam seeing his father across a common, and following him home without a word, is the first height, an ordinary suburban afternoon turned uncanny. The kitchen conversation, and the family round the Christmas tree singing the Pet Shop Boys, rise by understatement. The farewell, the parents fading while the light in the room changes, is the summit of the parents’ strand. The last scene is the film’s highest: “The Power of Love” played to protect a dead man, the camera drawing back from two bodies to a star field. Dread lives in the tower’s empty corridors, the alarm at night and the discovery of Harry’s body. Held at the figure because the summits are prepared by tenderness more than by scale, and the club passage is level.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The myth is built, not cited. The structure is a descent to the dead: a man takes a train out of the city to the house where his parents still live at the age they died, eats with them, is given what the living could not give, and must leave them. It is Orpheus inverted, the son going down to recover not a lover but his own unfinished childhood, and the parents, like the dead of the old stories, cannot follow him past the threshold. The source is a Japanese ghost story, and the second ghost, the lover in the tower who is already dead, keeps its inheritance: the beloved who visits at night is of the other world. The two ghost lines rhyme and close in the star. What holds the figure short of the gate: the descent is soft at its rules, why now, what the house is, what it costs.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is double: Yamada’s novel of 1987 and its film of 1988, a ghost story in which a divorced screenwriter meets his dead parents and a woman in his building who is a ghost; and the British and American queer chamber drama of the 2010s, to which Haigh’s own earlier work belongs. The turn makes the lover a man and the ghost story a reckoning with the 1980s, with the fear of AIDS and with coming out to parents who never had the chance to hear it; and it removes the source’s horror of the dead draining the son’s life, keeping the parents benign. That is a real reorientation of the source. The stake was modest: a studio-backed art film with two known actors, in a form, the dead returned for one conversation, long worked. A swerve of subject and feeling more than of form.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. The cutting does not mark the passage between the tower and the house: Adam steps out of one and into the other, the light shifts, and the film never explains, so the audience holds his grief as he does, as a place one simply goes. Reflections in glass, windows and mirrors double the figures throughout and keep the question of what is real in the image rather than in the plot. The parents being Adam’s age or younger is a decision of form that carries the knowledge: a man meets his parents as peers, and the conversations a child cannot have become possible. The ending rereads the whole Harry strand in the form itself. Held from higher by the club passage, which borrows a stock grammar of delirium, and by a revelation that works partly as a device.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Three years is too short to demonstrate return, and the axis is forecast; the forecast is good. The revelation about Harry sends a viewer back through every scene in the tower, asking who saw him, when, and whether he was ever there, and the film supports more than one answer. The parents admit a second reading, as Adam’s screenplay written in his head, and the film keeps a writer at a desk at its opening for that reason. The pattern of reflections, the songs, and the relation of the two ghost lines reward attention, and each holds more on a second viewing than on a first. What holds the axis: the central emotional matter is clear at once, much of the return is to feeling rather than to new meaning, and the critical literature is young, mostly reviews and appreciations.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 2020s. The intrinsic force is real: the film shows that a queer chamber drama can carry a ghost story’s structure without losing its realism of feeling, and that the 1980s, the decade of the fear of AIDS, can be reckoned with through the family rather than through public history. That is a strong personal synthesis, and its pressure on the form it joins is felt. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide critical acclaim on release, British awards nominations, and a place in the conversation about queer cinema and about the careers of Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal. What holds the figure: the film’s means were available and known, it reorganises little of what film can do, and no redirection of later films can yet be seen after three years.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the film as released survives whole, with no loss. Presence: three years of distribution through a studio, availability on streaming services and continuing attention; the presence is real and short. Fabric: a recent release, its master in no physical danger worth charging. The surface: the songs and the decor of the 1980s are the film’s subject and not a dating of it, and the tower and the city of the 2020s are kept spare enough to date lightly. What holds the axis is elapsed time: a span under five years stands at 7.5 or below, falling with the span, and three years sits a little below the top of that row. No survival can yet be credited beyond presence.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making carries the form in several departments. Andrew Scott holds the film at the level of the face and of reaction, a man of forty becoming a boy without a change of voice, and the coming-out scene rests on his listening. Claire Foy plays the mother’s fear and love in one movement, and Jamie Bell makes the father’s admission land with very little. Paul Mescal holds Harry at a deliberate opacity that the ending pays. Jamie D. Ramsay’s photography, with reflections, soft focus and the warm light of the house against the cool of the tower, and Jonathan Alberts’s cutting, which crosses worlds without marking them, are the instruments of the form. The costs: the club passage is staged loosely against the rest, some transitions lean on music, and the discovery in Harry’s flat is handled with more device than the quiet elsewhere.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a family singing round a Christmas tree in a lit suburban room, and a body found in an empty flat in a tower. One law governs both: the dead are present as long as they are loved, and love offered to the dead is real and cannot hold them. The parents and Harry obey it alike, and the tower’s emptiness, the train journeys and the songs belong to it. The range is wide for a chamber film, from domestic comedy to a horror image to a cosmic close, and the law holds across it. What holds the axis: the rules of the parents’ world are never set, when they appear and what ends them, which the film defends as grief’s logic but which leaves the law loose; and the Harry revelation, though seeded, can be felt as a turn of plot laid over a film that had obeyed feeling, a strain on the law rather than a breach.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 105 minutes holds, with no discount for the form, which the figure describes. Adam’s consciousness, held from inside through form; the family, a mother, a father and their only child, across the gap of death; sexuality and love, two men of different generations; a social history, the 1980s of the fear of AIDS and its long shadow in one man’s life; the city, a near-empty tower in a London of new building; work, a screenwriter who cannot write. They are integrated: the family, the history and the love are one wound. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour and the state are present only as background, the natural order and the sacred enter only as image at the close, and the world outside Adam’s four people is all but absent. A small form held tightly.
Score: 6.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep at 8.3, then The Living Form at 8.2 and The Unconcealment at 8.1. A descent to the dead built into the film’s structure, Orpheus inverted, with a second ghost line that rhymes it; a form whose unmarked crossings between the tower and the house, and whose parents as young as their son, are its knowledge; and a disclosure that holds, a mother’s love reaching for the only frames her decade gave her and a son hearing in them his own sentence.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.9: a man, his parents and his lover, with a decade’s fear behind them, held tightly as one wound, while labour, the state, the natural order and the sacred stay at the edges. Above it, Pressure on Tradition at 7.2, a strong synthesis made with available means and a reach three years cannot yet show, and The Imperishable at 7.3, a film whole in one release with a presence real and short.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 7.9, The Inner Law at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five of its axes: The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 falls two tenths short of the bar of 8.5, The Unconcealment at 8.1 four tenths short, The Swerve at 7.5 a full point short, and The Imperishable at 7.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.2 further still. The Universal Minimum is unmet at Pressure on Tradition, 7.2, and The Imperishable, 7.3, both below 7.5; The Swerve meets it exactly at 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.9. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.8, from a sum of 93.0, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of All of Us Strangers as released in 2023, about 105 minutes, in English and in colour: written and directed by Andrew Haigh, freely after Taichi Yamada’s novel Ijintachi to no natsu (1987), translated as Strangers; produced by Searchlight Pictures with Film4 and Blueprint Pictures; photographed by Jamie D. Ramsay, cut by Jonathan Alberts, with music by Emilie Levienez-Farrouch; with Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy and Jamie Bell. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. No line of dialogue is held to the word, so none is quoted, and speech is described; songs are named by title. The novel and Nobuhiko Obayashi’s film of it, The Discarnates (1988), are not part of the work and are named as its source and its forerunner. Details that could not be verified, among them the year of the parents’ death and Adam’s exact age then, the setting of the farewell, the house where the suburban scenes were shot, the film stock, the other songs on the soundtrack, the number of awards nominations, the number of scenes and the running order of the middle passages, are not given.