The Poetics of Estrangement and the Cinematic Unconscious in All of Us Strangers

Abstract

This essay examines how Andrew Haigh’s 2023 film, All of Us Strangers, creates an immersive encounter with the workings of the unconscious mind. The film parallels a psychoanalytic process in its exploration of the central character, Adam, who progressively gains access to his memory, childhood trauma, and inner life. Viewers watch the evolving nature of Adam’s psychic experience, voyeuristically participating in his deepening insights. The essay examines the “cinematic unconscious,” the narrative and visual strategies that usher spectators into Adam’s unconscious, affording a dreamlike experience of inhabiting another mind. Several filmic tactics enable the viewer’s entry into this psychic interiority. The film disrupts conventional temporality, which estranges spectators from narrative expectation and immerses them in an asynchronous filmic unconscious. All of Us Strangers reproduces aspects of Freud’s uncanny through Adam’s visits to his childhood house, which is unheimlich, “unhomelike,” exactly like itself and utterly different because it is now occupied by his dead parents, who are stopped in time. Dissolving boundaries between characters, visual effects of mirroring and duplication, bewildering transitions between scenes depict different forms of estrangement, from the self, family, body, and social structure. These strategies replicate in filmic and meta-filmic terms Adam’s psychic process of working through his arrested creativity and frozen grief.