Ariana DeBose in I.S.S.
I.S.S.
Especially here in the Midwest, can we collectively please stop labeling January as a movie lover's dumping ground? We hear the same complaint, from most of the same people, every year: January is the month in which studios release the dregs of the dregs, pathetically hoping that anything will capture audiences' attentions the way they were captured with whatever holiday-season holdovers are still in release. I stopped buying that claim ages ago.
Sure, we get a lot of losers in January. You know when else we get a lot of losers? December. And August. And the theoretically Oscars-friendly November, when my personal least-favorite movie of 2023 – I'm lookin' at you, Wish – landed. But speaking locally, January is also when we get titles that opened earlier in larger markets and might presumably receive Academy Awards acclaim – American Fiction, say, and All of Us Strangers (scroll below for a full account) … and, if your memory goes back that far, Clint Eastwood's American Sniper. That one scored a $100-million-plus domestic weekend in 2015 based largely on Midwestern audiences finally getting to see it, amassed a $547-million global total, and ultimately nabbed an Oscar from six nods including Best Picture.
Granted, to my knowledge, no January premiere has scored Academy recognition since Michael Bay's 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi seven years ago. But if you aren't expecting British-accented cin-e-mah, January usually delivers a perfectly acceptable number of more-than-decent entertainments, as it did last January with the devil-doll treat M3GAN – which, if memory serves, was the very first release in what turned out to be a quite-fine movie year. This month, we've already had Mean Girls, Night Swim, and the fascinating misfire The Book of Clarence. And now we have the space thriller I.S.S., which is exactly what an edgy, professionally rendered January debut should be: 90 minutes long. Is it good? Yes. Is it great? No. Is there any reason to complain about that? Hell, no.
Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite's outing has a delicious hook, one even more grabby than “What if that Lindsay Lohan comedy were a musical?” or “What if your swimming pool was haunted?” We're aboard the International Space Station with a crew of six, three Americans and three Russians, when their initial bonhomie is disrupted by the sight of fiery orange explosions on Earth that immediately suggest full-scale conflict between the U.S. and Russia. Sure enough, we're at war, and the American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts are given identical orders by their superiors on Earth: Take command of the I.S.S. through any means necessary.
This is one of those rare million-dollar cocktail-napkin premises, and throughout most of I.S.S., it leads to terrific things. Although none of the space travelers boast terribly distinct personalities, we enjoy their repartee as a team, and inherently understand that the orders they're given from below won't align with the relationships made above. (Chief among the inter-continental relationships, Chris Messina's American Gordon is having a barely secret affair with Maria Mashkova's Russian Weronika.) The tension in Cowperthwaite's movie, then, comes from waiting to see which members of which nationality crack first, and which nation should have ultimate control over the space station, before they all inevitably perish. Although the specifics wildly differ, it's all kind of like Alien, but without the alien. (It also feels a bit like a throwback to movies made under 2020 COVID restrictions – small cast, restricted space, be careful about how often actors are allowed to be fewer than six feet apart.)
For most of the film's breezy, just-right length, this gripping, low-key endeavor is quite a bit of fun – more so at the beginning and in the middle than at the end. I'm sorry, but physical altercations in zero gravity are just inherently hilarious, even when they're not meant to be. Generally speaking, it's a kick watching Cowperthwaite's six (and only six) cast members here float about. But the second they start floating about with weapons in hand – attacking one another with speed and velocity that I'm pretty sure would be impossible while weightless – I.S.S. falls into the realm of unintentional camp, and particularly during the final 15 minutes, John Gallagher Jr.'s twitchy, unnecessarily hammy performance as an anxious dad keeps it there. After everything for the space folk goes to hell, at least two of the director's gazed-upon tableaux appear to be striving for the poetic beauty of Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity without ever finding the source of their heart. Plus, while the movie ends in the only manner it conceivably could, at least if it wanted viewers to leave feeling less than suicidal, the final blackout before the end credits may convince some viewers that they just wasted 90 minutes on nothing.
Yet an hour-and-a-half of this sort of controlled panic isn't nothing – maybe especially in January, when we've been all but trained to view new releases this month as inherently not worth our time. Ariana DeBose tones down the manic theatre-kid energy that has made her so delightful/excruciating as a Tony Awards host and comes through with a solid, affecting turn as our audience surrogate, and excepting Gallagher, she's nicely matched with her equally low-key co-stars that include the equally bearded yet impressively distinct Pilou Asbǣk and Costa Ronin. While a few of Cowperthwaite's images may feel slightly self-conscious, she's tremendous with sustained tension and the background shots of Earth on fire, signaling that the extent of the war-torn destruction still makes up only a tiny portion of global territory. (Not since Gravity, at least on the big screen, have I been granted such a keen sense of just how big this planet of ours is.) And although there's significant unease in I.S.S., you may leave the film, as I did, grateful for its numerous practical tips, unlikely as their usage might be. I may never board the International Space Station, but if that improbable happenstance comes to pass, now I definitively know how to open, and consume, a bottle of vodka. Were I stranded in space with half my crewmates wanting me dead, that's the info I'd want first.
ALL OF US STRANGERS
It's been said that the most personal stories, when told well, can also be among the most universal. And after seeing writer/director Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers this past weekend at Iowa City's FilmScene at the Chauncey, it's hard to imagine who couldn't be at least modestly affected by this undeniably specific, beautifully performed tale of queer identity and familial displacement. Unlike Andrew Scott's protagonist, you may not have been a closeted gay kid in the late 1980s; you may not have lost your parents in a tragic accident at age 11; you may not have found your entire life, as you've hit middle age, shaped by those twinned truths from your past. But we've all been someone's child, and many of us have children of our own, and everyone can doubtless find some connection to the themes that Haigh's film touches on or outright explores: loneliness, tenderness, an ache for unconditional acceptance from the people you love. All of Us Strangers is a heartbreaker, to be sure, but it's not likely to leave you a blubbering wreck. Instead, regardless of your sexual leanings, you're probably more likely to leave it in a thoughtful and contemplative frame of mind – and maybe, like me, profoundly impressed by the delicate balancing act between realism and fantasy that Haigh pulls off.
In his perfectly calibrated, emotionally devastating portrayal, Scott plays London resident Adam, a 40-something screenwriter who, at the film's start, is clearly suffering from writer's block. He's trying to write about his past – principally his past shared with parents who died in a car accident when he was a pre-teen – when, while taking a long walk in his hometown stomping grounds, he becomes transfixed by a man who appears to be silently inviting Adam to follow him. In a dreamy state of fascination, Adam does, and winds up at his childhood home, where the mystery man opens the front door and invites his wife to meet their guest. She does, and we realize that both of these strangers are Adam's deceased parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy), looking exactly as they did when their son was 11 – meaning they're now technically younger than their adult child. Adam is asked inside, and before long, the long-separated family is sharing drinks and familial warmth and questions about how Adam's life has turned out – and the reunion's most wonderfully weird aspect is how absolutely not-weird it is.
From the start, Haigh (adapting Taichi Yamada's 1987 novel Strangers) presents us with a modern-day world in which everything feels just a little off. Adam lives in a new high-rise apartment complex that, given the absence of its roof, is clearly still under construction. Yet it's odd that the building's fire alarm randomly blares, and that we can hear what sounds like the ascent and descent of the elevator, when there's apparently only one other tenant in residence: the mustachioed Irish flirt Harry (a supremely soulful, mesmerizing Paul Mescal), who shows up drunk at Adam's door one night and is politely shooed away. Not long afterward, Adam and Harry become lovers, and their initial sexual heat rather quickly morphs into a comfortable cohabitation – one beautifully exemplified by shots of the pair in bed, sleeping in mirrored fetal positions with their backs to one another. Yet these sequences, with their easy familiarity and rapport, don't feel noticeably different from the ones in which Adam continues to return to his parents' house, eventually finding the courage to come out as gay to a mom and dad who can't fathom a satisfying life for their child in the face of late-'80s homophobia and AIDS.
These scenes hurt. Mom expressing her disappointment that Adam wouldn't simply want to choose a “normal” life with a wife and kids. Dad admitting that, were he one of his son's schoolmates, he might easily have been one of the bullies who shoved Adam's head in the toilet. Haigh's gorgeously empathetic script, though, isn't interested in damning. It wants simply to understand, or try to, which results in numerous sequences of marvelously rendered confessions and, if not ultimate absolution, at least forgiveness: Dad apologizing for never coming into Adam's bedroom when he heard his son crying; Mom admitting that, given Adam's routine need to climb into his folks' bed late at night, she should have more actively appreciated him for driving her bananas. All three family members are pained in both individual and tethered ways, yet it's to the audience's enormous benefit that Haigh doesn't want us to (thoroughly) suffer. Beyond the frequently playful, frisky chemistry between its romantic leads, there are delightfully unexpected laugh lines (Adam gets maybe the best one regarding his inability to adequately throw a ball), and Scott steals an entire scene, and lightens its load considerably, simply by donning a peerless it's-appropriate-to-laugh pair of kids' pajamas.
Because there are essentially only four roles in All of Us Strangers – the full cast is completed only by Carter John Grout as a voiceless Young Adam and Ami Tredrea as a waitress in the final minutes – Haigh's film feels readily transferable to the stage, and might've felt like a somewhat static stage adaptation if his superb acting quartet weren't so handsomely lit by cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay, and the writing weren't so transcendently rich. I can consequently forgive the movie for perhaps going a bit overboard on its visual flourishes. A protracted, mid-film sequence of Adam in the midst of a drug-fueled freakout is too overtly showy (and momentarily makes an already confusing timeline truly and confounding), and the final image goes for too much universality in that it actually, perhaps wrongfully, attempts to encompass the entire universe.
Yet I would've happy-sadly stuck with this probing, searching entertainment for far longer than the 105 minutes I spent with it. Cast in tricky roles that require they play both idealized parents and the flawed, uncomprehending parents they admit being, Bell and Foy are literally and figuratively magical. Mescal's genius lies in serving as Adam's unwavering sounding board – as he has repeatedly proven, the actor is a consummate screen listener – while also standing as a complicated, deeply sad figure with profound hurts of his own.
But All of Us Strangers is unequivocally an Andrew Scott showcase, and with American audiences generally forced to enjoy his greatness in limited doses (barring his online triumph in the one-man-show Sea Wall), he's all the reason you need for a visit to Haigh's latest. Like that equally fearsome talent Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction, Scott is in every scene here, and although his performance is divine, it's somehow still not enough of him. Especially when you consider scenes such as Adam's unsuccessful attempt to tell his dad, without crying, that his childhood trauma has been nullified because it happened a long time ago, and Adam trying to convince Mom that being gay isn't so scary or dangerous in the 2020s … knowing in his heart that it's not true. He was Moriarty, he was the Hot Priest, and now, at last, Andrew Scott is the male movie actor of the year.
