The Discarnates, All of Us Strangers and the pain of homecoming

The weight of memories hangs heavily over the films of Nobuhiko Obayashi. Characters cling to the past to avoid confronting the present. Ghosts are manifestations of internalised pain, trauma, history. Nostalgia, as an emotional tether, never goes uninterrogated — and never more critically than in the Japanese filmmaker’s 1988 feature The Discarnates (Ijin Tachi to no Natsu). Memories of lives, lived and unlived, emerge together as an intense hallucination. The void left by loss takes on the shape of the dead, approximates their behaviour, and mimics their comforting voice. But what if the very thing that soothes also sucks life dry? What if the ghosts of nostalgia turn out to be forces more vampiric?

Of all the filmmakers who could have brought Taichi Yamada’s novel Strangers (1987) to life on screen, none may have been a more natural fit than Obayashi, Japan’s chief purveyor of furusato eiga (hometown movies). Yamada had penned, in spare and sombre prose, a fresh take on the ghost story: a middle-aged man relives his lost youth with his long-dead parents in their family home while juggling a relationship with a mysterious woman in his apartment building. Obayashi, like Yamada, honed in not only on a study of buried grief, but also of urban loneliness. Tokyo, in the film, is a non-place, a term anthropologist Marc Augé used to describe the eerie uniformity of metropolitan spaces and the matching anonymity of inhabitants.

One of these inhabitants living in a high-rise concrete-and-glass monolith is Hideo Harada (Morio Kazama), a divorced screenwriter who has turned his office into his home. Hideo knows he is stuck in a rut but lacks the drive to get himself out of it. He has grown so listless he cruelly declines the drunken bid of a forlorn neighbour, a woman named Kei (Yuko Natori) looking for company on a lonely night. The next day, while scouting the Tokyo subway for a story, he finds himself in Asakusa, the district where he grew up before losing his parents in a hit-and-run accident. There, at a vaudeville show, he runs into his dad (Tsurutarô Kataoka), who looks the same as the day he died. So does his mom (Kumiko Akiyoshi), as he learns when invited to their old home for dinner. Once Hideo gets a taste, he keeps going back. How can he not? Everyday reality isn’t as inviting as a childhood fantasy, especially one where he can play cards, drink beer, eat ice cream, and make up for all that he missed with his parents. Meanwhile, back in his Tokyo apartment, a relationship slowly blossoms between Hideo and Kei, two lonely souls each scarred in their own way.

Retreating deep into fantasy to not deal with reality doesn’t come without a cost. With each visit, Hideo appears to lose a bit of himself. His teeth rot, his cheeks sink, his hair becomes discoloured, his face takes on a deathly pallor, his body deforms, as if the otherworld were sucking the life out of him. A day spent in the idyll of the past is like a year lost in the present. Memories, remembered and imagined, of the warmth, safety and all the familiar comforts stripped from him as a child, cast such a powerful spell he remains oblivious to his rapid ageing. Nostalgia becomes an addiction. And Hideo needs his fix every day, even if it leaves him depleted. The discarnates of the title alludes not just to the ghosts his memories carry, but all those who can’t let go of the past.

With the recent film, All of Us Strangers (2024), Andrew Haigh presents a deeply personal revision of Yamada’s novel. The British filmmaker behind Weekend (2011) and 45 Years (2015) departs from the source text by adding a queer wrinkle: Hideo is reimagined as a gay screenwriter robbed of the opportunity to come out to his parents when alive. The discarnate of Obayashi’s film applies equally well to Adam (Andrew Scott), a shell of a man, alone in his apartment, drawn to the past, looking for something he has lost, tempted but not yielding to the advances of Harry (Paul Mescal), the hot young neighbour from the sixth floor. The city of London looms beyond as another non-place, a reminder of just how alone he feels. Solitude and grief stir up a hallucination, opening a portal that allows Adam to reconnect with his mom and dad (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell). The more he gets to know his parents and they get to know him, the more he lets his guard down. Meeting them day after day in a series of supernatural encounters proves to be a welcome shot in the arm, as it helps him accept Harry into his life, allowing a pot-kindled one-nighter to develop into a meaningful connection, maybe for the first time in his life. Telling them the truth about his sexuality gives him the courage to move forward.

In the process of revision, Haigh eschews the life-sapping, the demonic make-up and all the horror of Obayashi’s film for a haunting reverie about queer identities and experiences amidst changing social contexts. Through the character of Adam, it pinpoints in particular the alienation felt by those who grew up during the AIDS crisis. By carrying over the supernatural atemporality of Yamada’s novel, it explores how generations of being marginalised has changed queer people’s relationship with time and history. “We’re untethered from time as queer people,” Haigh said in an interview. “We don’t see ourselves in the history everyone else has. We don’t follow their traditional path. We’re all strangely stunted. We end up being teenagers for longer, because we weren’t allowed to have a traditional teenage life, to feel certain things and have certain ambitions. I wanted to throw the notion of time up in the air.”

When a charming neighbour shows up at the doorstep, clutching a bottle of expensive booze, angling for an invite in, neither Hideo nor Adam opens the door fully — a sign of their fear of intimacy. Hideo is indifferent. Adam is conflicted. Both their hesitancy comes from a deep-seated turmoil. The tragedy of their childhood has left them emotionally closed-off. Hideo confesses he has seldom cried since the death of his parents at the age of 12. Making up for all that he missed in his youth provides him the strength to make up for all that he missed as an adult. Getting a second chance to know his parents feels like getting a second chance at life. He is more open with Kei. His general demeanour is not as withdrawn in his relationship with her, as it may have been in his failed marriage.

In the case of Adam, his queer identity has gotten tangled up in trauma, shame and all the things left unsaid when he lost his parents. The collapse of the distance between the past and the present creates a springboard for wish fulfilment. Adam’s mom and dad are suspended in time, in the 1980s, with appearance and attitudes intact. Which means coming out to them is charged with the tension of not being sure how they may react or how his relationship with them may change upon their knowing. Ghost-Mom is first shocked, then concerned. Being gay, she worries, makes for “a very lonely kind of life.” If he is lonely, he tells her it’s not because he’s gay. “Not really,” he adds, a postscript that suggests it isn’t the only reason. When she enquires about the “awful, ghastly disease,” he assures, “everything’s different now”: there are ways to prevent and control HIV/AIDS; gay couples can marry and have kids (at least in his part of the world). Ghost-Dad isn’t as shocked by Adam coming out. “I always knew you were a bit tutti-frutti,” he says, citing his son’s inability to throw a ball and tendency to sit with legs crossed as supposed signs. Adam breaks down in tears when his dad apologises to him for not consoling him as a child despite hearing him cry after being bullied in school.

Be it Ghost-Mom referring to Adam’s boyfriend as his “special friend” or Ghost-Dad peddling stereotypes, the damage of their ‘80s panic and microaggressions linger on as a fear of intimacy decades later in a relatively more unprejudiced world. The shift in generational attitudes goes both ways. Adam favours the term “gay” and Harry favours the term “queer”, two former slurs reclaimed. For Adam, growing up with a fear of AIDS meant sex got equated with death. For Harry, there is no such fear. Adam struggles with scars from his parents not knowing who he is and whether they would love and accept him if they did. Harry struggles with scars in spite of coming out to his parents and their acceptance. Because it is their quietness about it that created a distance. His hetero-siblings took the “spot in the centre,” while he “drifted to the edge.” With a resignation, he says, “I’ve always felt like a stranger in my own family.” In terms of the modern queer experience, Harry represents the other side of the coin.

Two ghost stories, two worlds and two temporalities inhabit the same representational space in both films. In The Discarnates, Obayashi films the scenes in the “real world” in washed-out blues and greys. The cold impersonality of Hideo’s apartment conveys how he has been going through life alone. Painful memories, regrets and secrets seem to drain his home off all colour and life. The “ghost world” on the other hand is filmed as a sun-kissed idyll bathed in warm hues. Hideo’s childhood home is like a cocoon preserved in amber for him to regain what he has lost. In the company of his parents. Free from the worries of the real world. The domestic scenes look like something right out of one of his own soaps. To encapsulate how Hideo perceives the world around him through a TV writer’s eyes, scenes transition with colours fading out and the image shrinking to the centre of the screen, like old CRT TVs would when switched off. Haigh doesn’t emphasise the contrast between the worlds by way of colour as much in All of Us Strangers. Instead, he uses reflections and overlaps in windows and mirrors as a recurring motif in a film mapping the liminality of queer experience.

Where All of Us Strangers falters is in not giving us a sense of who Adam is beyond his trauma. The pains of the past have fractured Adam’s identity to the point where his parents and Harry all feel like nothing more than his hangs-ups made manifest. In fact, his mom and dad don’t even get names. Granted, he is a man haunted by ghosts and hovering through an in-between realm like a ghost himself. But people aren’t solely defined by their trauma and their reactions to it. Yamada and Obayashi furnish a richer personal history for their flesh-and-blood protagonist outside of his lonely bachelordom. Hideo was once married. If he is now alone, it’s because he is divorced, his son couldn’t care any less what happens to him, and his boss wishes to date his ex-wife. From his television work and read-throughs, we learn screenwriting allows him an emotional buffer to engage or disengage as he wishes. No wonder he keeps a distance from the people in his life like they were ghosts, while wholeheartedly embracing ghosts like they were people.

There is even an Oedipal undercurrent to Hideo’s encounters with his Ghost-Mom. One hot afternoon, he drops by to find her preparing a fresh batch of home-made ice cream. She urges him to take off his shirt and pants so he isn’t uncomfortable in the stifling summer heat. Being a grown man, he hesitates. Nonetheless she undresses him herself, wipes away the sweat off his body with a wet cloth, and treats him, as a mother would a 12-year-old child. Just the same, she isn’t unmindful of the fact that he is now all grown up — as evidenced by her standing on his back to reach for ice-cream cups on the top of a shelf. When she slips, his arms cushion her fall. As their eyes meet, the sexual tension is writ large. During the corresponding scene in All of Us Strangers, a rain-drenched Adam gets out of his wet clothes in front of his Ghost-Mom who is sizing him up. “You look totally different, but it’s still you,” she says, pressing her right hand against his shaved chest, then caressing his face. “I thought you’d be hairier. Like your dad.” She prefers a hairy chest herself, she says, before remarking how her son is a spitting image of her own dad. “It’s like seeing you both at exactly the same time.” Adam’s very first encounter with Ghost-Dad is charged with homoerotic frisson. Haigh frames the scene like the two are cruising each other. Except if Adam is cruising, he is cruising the past to come to terms with who he is right now.

At the end of The Discarnates and the novel it’s based on, we realise we have been fed a red herring. It isn’t Hideo’s ghost-parents who are draining him dry; it is Kei, who took her own life after being turned away at the door the night they first meet. Ghost-Kei feels bitter about Hideo continuing to live when his indifference to her loneliness robbed her of the same chance. If the present is lost for her, it should be for him as well, she reasons. When he vows his love for her, she bares her wounds to a man torn by regret. In a final act of mercy, she lets him go, bids farewell and disappears into the hereafter. “Forget about me. Live! You still have time to regain yourself,” she tells him. Throughout the film, Obayashi uses “O mio babbino caro”, from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, to punctuate Hideo and Kei’s relationship. In the climax, the aria takes on added poignancy, its plea of a young woman to not separate her from her lover echoing Kei’s own tragic fate.

Music opens up portals to memories in All of Us Strangers. Early in the film, when Adam is writing his screenplay or at least trying to, listening to Fine Young Cannibals’ ska tune Johnny Come Home leaves him digging through a box of old cassettes, lighters and photos. It’s as if the song is calling him home. And he answers it. Several homecoming trips later, he helps his parents put up decorations on a Christmas tree, a moment made post-card perfect by the Pet Shop Boys’ cover of Brenda Lee’s Always on My Mind playing on the radio. “Maybe I didn’t hold you/All those lonely, lonely times/And I guess I never told you/I am so happy that you’re mine,” his mom sings along. Hearing these words seems to heal his inner child a bit. When the time does come to say goodbye, the three meet at a favourite diner from his childhood to reaffirm their love for each other and move on.

If O mio babbino caro is the leitmotif of choice in The Discarnates, it is Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘80s ballad The Power of Love in All of Us Strangers. When Harry knocks on Adam’s door, looking to flirt his way in with a half-empty bottle of expensive Japanese whiskey, the song is playing on TV. “There’s vampires outside my door,” Harry tells Adam, tweaking the second line in hope that some company may keep the monsters away. Adam refuses to let him in. Shortly thereafter, a lonely Harry died of an overdose — a truth withheld until the closing minutes. Adam, having moved on from his ghost-parents and ready to reconnect with the real world, comes looking for Harry in his apartment, only to find him dead in the bedroom. Ghost-Harry walks in to realise the truth, like the Bruce Willis character in The Sixth Sense. As the existential anguish of remembering his own death registers, he asks Adam, “How come no one found me? Where was my mum and my dad?” Adam reassures him, “I found you,” before bringing him back to his apartment. The two curl up in bed to the strings of The Power Of Love, the same song that played when they first met. This time, Adam quotes the opening lyrics as words of comfort. “I’ll protect you from the Hooded Claw,” he tells Harry, “Keep the vampires from your door.” A light shines between the two spooning lovers, growing brighter and brighter, as the camera pulls away till they are one star in a constellation of lonely strangers, all finding love and sanctuary amidst the endless darkness. For, as the band frontman Holly Johnson sings, “love is the light scaring darkness away.”

The ending is more bittersweet than happy, same as in The Discarnates. A recovering Hideo is typing up a screenplay in a hospital room while attempting to mend his relationship with his visiting son. He appears to be at peace with the fact that his ex-wife is marrying his boss. In a closing voiceover, he thanks his parents and Kei. “I’ll go on living,” he promises. The first time Hideo meets Kei outside his door, she declares herself a fan of his work, complimenting his dialogue by quoting a line from one of his stories: “They say you can’t bring back what’s passed. But that’s not true. You can because it’s your past.” Both films literalise the idea of bringing back the past, while restoring the tenor of the word nostalgia to its bittersweet Greek origin — as the pain of homecoming.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.