Keeping the vampires from your door
He can do this because he has training as a Hot Priest, you see.
I think sometimes too much of a local fuss is made when Irish Lads Do Well For Themselves, but I also adore it when it really feels merited. Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal are properly superb in All Of Us Strangers, directed by Andrew Haigh and based on the Japanese novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada (1987, translated into English in 2003, and a good deal more heterosexual than this adaptation).
I love that this is a film with a not-insubstantial amount of gay sex in it that people are going to see in their local cinema because it's the Irish Lads, and because it's allowed be a mainstream movie instead of something niche in the IFI that you go to see with a small group of friends or maybe on your own and don’t talk about at school or at home.
I think about these things in large part because the changing-of-the-times is an important element in this story - modern-day Adam (Scott), who lost his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) just before his 12th birthday, is mysteriously able to visit versions of them and catches them up on his life, including coming out to people whose idea of "gay life" is stuck in the late 1980s & whose concerns (as they were for many at that time) are that their son won't be accepted by others and that he'll become infected with an impossibly terrifying illness.
Alongside this is Adam's burgeoning relationship with the younger Harry (Mescal, who has acted with Scott before in one of the most delightful Comic Relief bits of all time), the only other resident in a new London apartment block and a prompt for a discussion on how terminology for sexual identity changes over the decades. Harry is a chance for Adam to properly open up, but he's still (literally) haunted by the loss of his parents, lonely and aching and resistant to letting himself be vulnerable.
This is beautifully shot and beautifully acted; it is also a tiny bit of a heartbreaker. An amazing mostly-retro soundtrack, too; 'The Power of Love' by Frankie Goes To Hollywood is used particularly effectively (oh my heart). Would firmly recommend going to see it, but also you don't need my recommendation because this is not a niche gay film for a tiny audience of artsy intellectuals and angsty queer teens, it's everywhere, and I am glad of that.