Andrew Haigh’s latest film, All of Us Strangers, is an adaptation of Strangers, a 1987 novel by Taichi Yamada, and revolves around one exchange between two gay men living in a London apartment block. Adam, played by Andrew Scott, is a screenwriter, while Harry, his younger neighbour, played by Paul Mescal, is a tipsy drifter. In the opening scenes of the film, Harry turns up at Adam’s front door and propositions him. At first, it seems that the two men do indeed sleep together and from there start a tentative romance that promises to rescue them from their mutual loneliness. Yet the film ends by revealing that Adam in fact rejected Harry and that everything else we have seen has been a projection back and forward in time. In effect, then, All of Us Strangers fashions an alternative past and future from one moment of missed connection, thereby cementing itself as part of a lineage of texts that understand queerness as a displacement in space and time. This is the mnemosexuality of Proust and Pet Shop Boys, with touches of Terence Davies, in which gay men, in particular, find themselves jettisoned from the spatiotemporal coordinates of everyday society. Those same coordinates help protect the majority of people from contemplating their own mortality too closely, meaning that this is also a vision of queerness bound up with death – and in both of these alternative timelines, Adam is confronted with dead loved ones who ask him how they died.

Before we arrive at this final revelation, however, Adam’s attraction to Harry takes place in the midst of a profound spatial dysphoria. They seem to be the only two people living in their building, which becomes an architecture of queer loneliness, a concrete correlative to a closet epistemology in which every act of self-disclosure is simultaneously too public and too private. The building itself is panoramic and expansive but also strangely hermetic and isolated, a paradox encapsulated in the dreamlike suspension of the elevator, which is mirrored on both sides, presenting Adam and Harry with an endless recession of images. Both of them once had friends who have since moved out to the suburbs to raise families, leaving them in a state of escalating marginality: “You could say I have drifted to the edge of things.” Whenever they step outside they are surrounded by enormous swathes of empty space and it is these voids that contour the film’s first shift into fantasia. The morning after sleeping with Harry, Adam drifts dream-like back to his home town, where he sees a boy in a window who appears to be an echo of his former self. Gradually the texture of the town coalesces around a man, who he follows through streets, across fields, and into a store. At first, this man feels like a projection of Adam’s inner self, then like a man he might be cruising, before finally coming into focus as his father, played by Jamie Bell, who takes him home to have dinner with his mother, played by Claire Foy, despite the fact both of them have been dead for decades.

A profound temporal dysphoria now ensues, shifting the film into the subjunctive, and splitting the difference between queerness now and queerness as it existed in the late 80s when Yamada wrote his novel. Glimpses of the Shard and scenes involving vaping indicate that we are indeed in the 2020s and yet this is a present tense utterly suffused with the 80s, and with a yearning brand of 80s pop that sought to take stock of and come to terms with the past. Adam and Harry may be different ages but they seem to belong to this same suspended age between 80s and 10s and much of their dialogue consists in reflecting upon what hasn’t changed: “It was a long time ago.” “I don’t think that matters.” “Things are better now,” Adam concedes, even as he notes that “it doesn’t take much to make you feel the way you felt – back then.” Caught in this liminal timeframe, the men’s parents become the lost objects needed to reorient them to the present. Harry rarely sees his father and Andrew’s died in a car accident, making it doubly uncanny when his mother tells him that he looks like her own father did at his age, to the extent that “it’s like seeing you both, at exactly the same time.”

Layered into that loss is the complex melancholy of recalling people who are no longer around to come out to – and the equally complex melancholy of an interstitial parental generation who neither quite pathologised nor normalised queerness. Coming out to his parents in this suspended space jettisons Adam and the film into a double subjunctive, as his father asks him “would you have liked me to have known?” At times, the film itself feels like something of a lost object, a elegiac reminder of all the stories that couldn’t be told during the 80s, the period that most entrances Haigh and his characters. Just as Adam almost needs death to remove his parents to the fantasmatic distance where the question of his sexuality can be breached, All of Us Strangers also exudes a kind of relief that it wasn’t made at the time it depicts, since that is at least testament to the fact that some conversations never have (or had) to be had.

As the film proceeds, Haigh draws a shimmering and evanescent skein between the reality and fantasia, much of it involving 80s pop music. Trains form the initial connective tissue between the apartment block and town, the two main spaces in the film, and these in turn evoke one of the most pervasive motifs of furtive queer texts from this period: leaving a small town to find acceptance or at least anonymity in the big city. Adam tears up for the first time when his mother recalls his attempt to run away to London as a small child in terms that recall both the lyrics to the Communards’ “Smalltown Boy” and, more distantly, “Two Divided by Zero,” the first track on the first Pet Shop Boys album, which sees Neil Tennant encouraging a friend to head for London with him. The latter was apparently inspired by Tennant’s own childhood, when he would hang over a bridge crossing his local railway, and dream of finding a new life for himself in the city, one whose possibilities could barely be articulated or formulated. When the fantasia starts to fall apart so do these transitional spaces, whether in Adam’s nightmare of following Harry through a crowded Tube station, or their first trip to his parents together, when they sit backwards on the train, watching the world outside recede.

However, the most beautiful fusion of reality and fantasia occurs in the form of a musical montage sequence that both begins and ends with iconic Pet Shop Boys tracks from their third album, Introspective. As the two men leave the apartment block together for the first time, we hear “I Want a Dog” playing over the one and only gay bar that we see in the film, whose dance floor pulses back into the coloured lights blinking outside Adam’s apartment window. Then, as their immersion in a hedonistic collectivity reaches it climax, we shift to “Always on My Mind,” the straightest, most closeted and least characteristic Pet Shop Boys song of the era, which coincides with the revelation that this is the Christmas season, as the whole sequence ends with Adam spending Christmas Eve with his parents. Between those two poles of the Pet Shop Boys catalogue lies all the sadness and yearning of the film, along with its hope for a time that can never be, as Adam’s mother uses the Elvis cover to tacitly acknowledge her son’s queerness, before his father has them all pose for a family photograph that even more subtly indicates a certain acceptance of what could never have been spoken.

So mercurially does Haigh build this alternative past, and immerse us in the alternative future that it evokes, that it’s quite shocking, in the closing scenes, to return to the future that actually eventuates. For it turns out that Adam never accepted Harry’s advances, spent most of the night alone, and finally went down to check on his one neighbour, only to find that he had drunk himself to death. Both past and future are tragic and yet the majesty of All of Us Strangers is the way in which it manages to distill a spectral alternative temporality – what Jose Esteban Munoz described as the then and there of queer futurity – despite this one moment of connection seeming destined to devolve. Throughout the film, Haigh shoots the sex scenes with a beautiful sensuality, never shying away from explicit acts but texturing them with verbal and physical conversations that deepen and richen as Adam and Scott lie together, tracing out the contours of each others’ skin, rubbing, caressing and cradling faces, arms and hands. The sex scenes are thus most memorable as they are beginning and ending, like the synth textures that fade in and out at the start and end of an 80s song, and it is these synth textures that finally envelop, crystallise and cosmicise them, as the camera pulls back from them in bed with each other to an enormous void which is then populated by the stars of the galaxy and the sparkles of a disco ball, all as Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “The Power of Love” reaches its climax. Earlier on, Adam admits that he didn’t have sex for many years because he “didn’t want to die” but even in the midst of that morbid ambience All of Us Strangers finds an elsewhere and elsewhen that is remarkably life-affirming; defiantly and queerly optimistic.