All of Us Queers: Memory, Mourning and Melancholy in Andrew Haigh’s <i>All of Us Strangers</i>

Abstract With its mise-en-scène of derelict sites and decomposing bodies, its story-line of lives lost and (re)found and, above all, its thematic of remembrances of things yet-to-come, Andrew Haigh’s BAFTA-winning film, All of Us Strangers (2023), enacts, as queer theorist Jack/Judith Halberstam might say, an “aesthetics of collapse” – London as the city in extremis – and, with it, an “unworlding”: especially, in the final and fantastical astral transmogrification of its protagonists, lovers Adam and Harry, that is, at once, deific and pop cultural. This article will argue that, in its startling yoking of dystopia and utopia, as well as its bold deconstruction of phantasy and the Real, its mixing of mourning and melancholy, its blurring of being and time, its astonishing conflation of past, present and future, Haigh’s All of Us Strangers meditates, cinematically, on what it means to remember , exploring the psychic, identic and social invention of memory that recalls neither the forgotten nor the repressed, the denied or the screened, but a (queer) life never lived, and its “impossible” law of desire.